Visual Storytelling with Maps: Update and Outlook from an Empirical Study

Here, we present and reflect upon empirical research reported in Song, Roth, et al. {, 2022 #66} on the design of maps that support visual storytelling. In the following, we use story to describe an account of specific events, places, and people and narrative to describe the structure and presentation of this content that shapes the meaning of the story (Pearce 2008). Despite both scholarly and practical advancement in the history, application, and critique of narrative and story in cartography and related fields, there remains relatively limited empirical research on the intentional design of visual stories, particularly on map-based strategies and techniques, and the subsequent interpretation of these designs by their audience. We addressed this gap through an empirical study providing the first assessment of four design considerations for visual storytelling with maps: story map themes and their constituent narrative elements, visual storytelling genres, visual storytelling tropes, and individual audience differences.