imagineRio Narratives: A Customized Map-Based Storytelling Application

Alida Metcalf, Rice University
David Heyman, Axis Maps
Bruno Buccalon, Rice University

ESRI’s Story Map platform opens up exciting ways to combine “authoritative maps with narrative text, images, and multimedia content,” and, according to ESRI, the platform makes “it easy to harness the power of maps and geography to tell your story” [ https://storymaps-classic.arcgis.com/en/]. Esri’s Story Maps platform has been very successful, and it allow users to do many things. However getting students, historians, and the interested layperson to create good story maps is not an easy task, and sometimes less is more. For creating map-based stories drawn from imagineRio, we believe that a simplified, customized application ensures better storytelling. By providing less functionality, we will allow more people to create narratives without needing to know GIS. Our open-source web-based application gives all users access to imagineRio’s temporally accurate base map, as well as its curated primary sources--georeferenced historical maps, plans, and views. Students, scholars, historians, residents, and others can focus on interpreting the history and architecture of the spaces of the city by creating Narratives/Narrativas in English or Portuguese. Our application allows them to share their stories with others, and, through a collaborative forum, to discuss new data, updates, and improvements for imagineRio. This leads to new ways of interpreting the past, understanding the present, and possibly even envisioning a better future for Rio de Janeiro. This paper explores how we designed the application and created a community of early users who shaped its final development. This project, undertaken during the covid-19 pandemic (severe in both the US and Brazil), reflects a turning point in our our methodology, for we recognized the urgent need to engage meaningfully with those using imagineRio and to offer creative, but technically robust, ways to write, illustrate, and analyze a city living through turbulent times.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 118. Project Development