Five Ways to enhance your Animated, Narrative Map

Richard Treves, Southampton University

With the rise of powerful, free tools such as Google Earth Tour Builder and ESRI Story Maps there is a rising interest in creating animated narrative maps or map tours. The author has been performing user tests on map tours and has sucessfullly set them as student assignments in a cartography course since 2011. Based on his experiences this talk will present five best practices for designing effective map tours: effective camera paths between tour locations in terms of speed and route; how to use layers; use of screen and mouse annotations; the importance of an audio narrative and the power of switching between thematic map and reality (photos/streetview).

Transcript

1. Five ways to enhance Narrative, Animated Maps Richard Treves (@Trevesy) School of Geography and Environment
2. Introduction Tours: Why as an assignment? Five Good Practices –  Path/Audio/Layers/Annotations/ Streetview –  Applicable beyond education What students thought of the assignment 2
3. 3 Why Zoom/Pan Tours? Gone with the wind
5. Tours Development 5 *Goodchild (2008) ‘the use cases of Google Earth’ Usable Power of computers Bandwidth
6. Student Created My students* learn about creating: –  Good Cartography –  Animating maps –  Audio narration: Practice for talks –  Screencasting (dead easy) 6 *UOSM2002 “Design Skills, maps and presentations”
7. Design Rules 7 *UOSM2002 “Design Skills, maps and presentations”
8. 1] Crows vs Rockets* 8 *All good design points reviewed in detail, Treves and Bailey (2012). This particular experiment is unpublished.
9. 2] Audio Narrative 9 *Mayer and Moreno (2003)
10. 3] Use of Layers/Annotations 10
11. 11 4] North up, Look down
12. 5] Symbol => Real *Fisher & Unwin (2002), Virtual Reality in Geography 12
13. What Students said 13 •  Prefer to face to face talk? •  Average response 7.3/10
14. Conclusion Tours are effective Low barriers to production Good student assignment and for public Needs more research into how and when to use them 14
15. References A number of papers are referenced within the slides Relevant blog posts •  Google Earth Tour Builder review and tutorial •  Example of ‘A’ level (18 years old) student created tour: –  Teaching content: 1 hour face to face tutorial and some written support material 15