Earlier this summer I had the opportunity to return to San Diego, where ESRI, the creators of the premier GIS tools on the planet – the ArcGIS Pro desktop and ArcGIS Enterprise suite, along with a panoply of extensive mapping applications, hosts their annual User Conference, and the pre-conference Education Summit. The nearly 20,000 in-person attendees and a nearly similar number of virtual attendees were presented with an overwhelming array of improvements, best practices, future directions, insights, and fellowship all around mapping.

We saw impressive displays of mapping talent from nearly every sector, from local, county, state and country governments, planning and documenting their infrastructure, their demographics, or upcoming projects, to educational institutions teaching students how to both gather and more effectively represent their data in maps, to corporations supporting this work with newer and better ways of doing things (and of course, wanting to sell it to the rest of us!).

Exciting work

One intriguing example of innovation was how a faculty member in Dallas, TX is training his students to develop virtual models of their Universities physical facilities using a LIDAR scanning process that “captures” a building, walking through it in a day, and then having a fully realized, accurate 3D rendering of that entire indoor space by the following day!

Higher Education and StoryMaps

As part of a group of higher education folks, I had the opportunity to meet with the ESRI’s ArcGIS StoryMaps team to help communicate to them what our we feel are the priorities for our faculty, who’ve really taken to teaching students to use the ArcGIS StoryMaps tools to present their academic work in a coherent and engaging way. While not all of our requests are things that are going to happen soon, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that many things were on the development plan for ArcGIS StoryMaps, and there were new features that we feel our communities will really enjoy adopting and using to better engage their audiences with their research.

Of the things we asked for, several stand out. First what their team currently calls a “script embed” will allow folks to host custom ArcGIS StoryMap URLs. This feature will hopefully also enable several other of our requests, including the ability to include subheadings in the StoryMap navigation bar, to allow for custom color options for headers in ArcGIS StoryMap themes, and to effectively allow folks to make new ArcGIS StoryMaps appear to be self-hosted. With a simple line of embed code, you’ll be able to present your StoryMap from your own URL and use CSS to alter the look and feel of many of it’s elements. Another new feature coming soon will be the ability to have 360 degree photo support for inclusion in StoryMaps.

Feedback Wanted

Several of our requests need some more examples from our community to help the StoryMaps team better understand the need. Those include resizing of images inside of StoryMaps, the addition of a StoryMap legend option for included maps, and an option for interactive maps in a StoryMap PDF export.

Coming Soon: Better Media & 3D

Some other features coming soon include pop-up media enhancements, such as adding images and videos to express-map pop-ups, being able to choose to fit or fill the pop-up, adding attribution and alt-text to pop-ups, crop, rotate and mark-up of images, and being able to click to expand the pop-up. Better support for media layers will also allow one to tell stories using time in 3D sourced from both web maps and what ESRI calls web scenes with a new time animation widget. There are enhancements to map transitions and scale bar updates too.

Tables and Themes

ArcGIS StoryMaps will soon include better support for tables to present simple tabular information in a way that is both accessible and themed. There will be a media action button to view a different piece of media, such as switching between a map to an image. And there will be more control over and ability to duplicate themes. Users will be able to edit and customize themes, and they’ve added over 20 ready-to-go themes, all with an eye for high contrast and accessibility.

New API

There is a new ArcGIS API for Python StoryMaps Module that will support both standard StoryMaps and ArcGIS StoryMap Briefings (which are now more fully supported and are like a slide based presentation, rather than scrolling down a web page). This API will enable significant story management and automation functionality.

New Layouts

Coming soon are a new “Categories” layout to add several groups of features with different colors and symbols, for fans of the classic “shortlist” template. You will also be able to create simple charts inside the StoryMap builders tools, including bar, donut, line charts and more. There will be theme updates, including header colors, button alignment and text colors, adjusting the base font size and even using your ArcGIS Organization’s shared theme. For those who don’t know about them, ArcGIS StoryMaps now better supports their Briefings mode, which is more like a slide presentation than a web page. If you’re having students present their work in a classroom setting, this may well be a better choice!

Accessibility is a priority

A significant throughline in all of this work is that accessibility is a requirement for what they’re developing. Closed captions and transcripts for video and audio media will be supported moving forward. I spoke personally with one of the leaders of the StoryMaps team and heard how integral accessibility has become to their development efforts. I don’t expect any new StoryMaps tools to be released without consideration for how it can be more accessible for the community of users.

The big new thing

And finally, what I mentioned near the beginning, the StoryMaps team is working on what they’re currently calling “Script Embed” which they hope will enable hosting StoryMaps on your own domain using custom URLs. You’ll be able to use your own analytics service on that hosted page. And you’ll be able to apply your own custom styles, including fonts, logo position and size, header height, adding a splash screen and your own custom story footer, with whatever links you want to include.

AI and Mobile, of Course

Like everything ESRI is incorporating private AI into StoryMaps, designed with opt-in/opt-out options, set up to empower authors, improving the speed of creation and quality of storytelling. And finally, StoryMaps will soon have it’s own StoryMaps Mobile App!

To get started with ArcGIS StoryMaps at Swarthmore, contact Doug Willen in ITS or simply log into our ArcGIS Online instance.