Program Description

Tell the story of your data with StoryMaps — a user friendly web application where you can combine your data and maps with narrative text, images, and multimedia content. Whether you’re a student, instructor, or aspiring researcher, you can use these Story Maps to investigate pertinent issues in public health, disease surveillance, chronic illness, political geography, public safety, or other areas of interest.

The workshop will enable participants to understand how a story can be effectively told with today’s interactive, web-based StoryMaps, learn how to showcase your data using the Story Map format, and learn how to create Story Maps that incorporate sounds, video, photographs, narrative, and other multimedia. Through discussion and the use of several examples participants will learn how and why to create Story Maps using the online platform and be confident that you can use them for your data when you are ready.

In this workshop, we walk through steps to developing a Story Map:

• Review and apply multiple formats/templates to different storymaps with no technical expertise needed;
• Use the power of geography to make maps with simple annotation and drawing tools;
• Combine interactive maps with dynamic content – text, photos, video – within your user experience that are intuitive;
• Share your StoryMap to a larger audience which can add value to your organization’s overall message.

Hands-on practice using the StoryMap online portal and discussion will center on understanding how to create the necessary layers for your StoryMap and how to use text, photos, video and other multimedia to effectively tell your story.

The program offers public health and communication knowledge with resources that provides skill building relevant for telling your data’s story to internal and external clients and to the general public.

Competencies

Participants will learn:

• The function of StoryMaps and the benefit they provide in different settings;
• How to determine what data is necessary to build an effective Story Map, using your own data;
• To apply key design features for effective information dissemination using text and multimedia;
• To disseminate your story map using the social media template options.

Required knowledge/pre-requisites/software

The basic software is FREE – and online so you don’t need to download anything! We cut and paste a bit from text (using notepad) – beyond that nothing needed.

More information

StoryMaps

Pricing plans are Free and Premium – the basic version of StoryMaps will work for this course.