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Research Guides@Tufts

BIO7: Environmental Storytelling with ArcGIS Storymaps

A guide for creating digital stories with ArcGIS Storymaps

Storytelling elements and structure

Storytelling at its most basic is comprised of a character(s) and a series of events that have cause and effect relationships.  Using storytelling in science can help communicate new knowledge to wider audiences, unpack the nuances and interconnectedness of environmental concerns to human systems or help build empathy around a particular topic.

Two common narrative structures highlighted in the Nature Masterclass, Narrative Tools for Researchers, are And-But-Therefore or Situtation-Complication-Resolution.  These structures help define the issue, share the problem and offer a resolution.  

In the article Using Story to Change Systems, Ella Saltmarshe offers three useful structures for building stories for change that incorporate systems thinking for subjects whose "resolution" might not be so clear; stories as light, stories as glue and stories as web.  Articulating the goal of your story can help you to decide on how to develop and shape your story.

Story helps illuminate the past, present, and future, thus lighting up the paths of change. Specifically, it:

  1. Highlights the fault lines in a system and makes visceral cases for change.
  2. Illuminates outliers and builds a cohering narrative around their work.
  3. Shines a light on visions of the future that change the way people act in the present.

Story is also a tool for building community through empathy and coherence. It enables people to connect across difference and to generate narratives that hold together groups, organizations, and movements. 

Finally, we can use story to reauthor the web of narratives we live in. Specifically, we can use it to:

  1. Change the personal narratives we have about our lives. 
  2. Change the cultural narratives that frame the issues we advocate for.
  3. Change the mythic narratives that influence our worldview.

The IPCC handbook on effective communication about climate change offers 6 guiding principles for storytelling about climate change but are relevant to environmental storytelling in general.  They are:

  1. Be a confident communicator
  2. Talk about the real world, not abstract ideas
  3. Connect with what matters to your audience
  4. Tell a human story
  5. Lead with what you know
  6. Use the most effective visual communication

They elaborate on these details in their full report which is linked below.

Accessibility

According to the CDC, 26% of adults in the US have a disability.  Designing your Storymap with accessibility in mind ensures that members from various communities can engage with your work. Below are some tips to make your Storymap more accessible:

  • Create meaningful titles and headers.
  • Use Headings when starting a new section, not simply large font
  • Use descriptive link text
  • Use alt text to describe any media on your site, including info-graphics with embedded text.  For examples of alt text, try these tools .
  • Be mindful of your color choices and contrast. Folks with color blindness won't be able to see new sections or cues based on color, and if your font doesn't have enough contrast from the background it can't be read.  This accessibility tool  can help identify any potential problems with contrast or color.  This site provides examples  of colors that pass accessibility guidelines.
  • Don't have audio auto-play. Not only can it be disorienting, but folks who use screen readers may need to take additional time to locate how to turn it off.

Ethical storytelling

When using storytelling to communicate scientific research, it's important to consider in what ways you might be augmenting the research to tell your story and impact audience takeaways.  Depending on your goal, the ethics of your approach my shift.  In Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences, Michael F. Dahlstrom states,

A narrative aiming to persuade could exemplify the preferred side of the issue while championing a character who is rewarded for making the “right” choices. In contrast, a narrative aiming to increase comprehension could exemplify how science influences multiple sides of an issue through the eyes of a character who actively considers the options. Both goals could be ethical in different circumstances—personal autonomy is often championed, but persuasion may be appropriate in contexts where social benefits are large enough to outweigh individual choice—so any narrative created needs to be carefully aligned with the appropriate goal for the situation.