On June 10, Allen Carroll’s new book Telling Stories with Maps, was launched, shedding light on the evolving role of maps in storytelling. As the founder of Esri StoryMaps and former Chief Cartographer at National Geographic, Carroll’s impact on how we use maps to communicate complex stories is undeniable. His latest work delves into the unique power of combining maps with multimedia to create more engaging and meaningful narratives.

Having admired Allen’s work for years, I was thrilled to not only review his book but also to sit down with him for an insightful conversation. In our discussion, we explored the inspiration behind the book, the development of StoryMaps, and the significant milestones that have shaped his approach to cartography and storytelling.

Through this conversation, Allen shares his perspective on the evolving field of cartography, the technology behind StoryMaps, and the lessons learned throughout his career. It’s a fascinating look at both the technical and personal experiences that have influenced his work, offering a deeper understanding of the person behind the maps.

(Stay tuned — my full review of the book is coming soon!)

What inspired you to write this book? Was it a natural extension of your work at National Geographic and Esri, or was there a specific moment or experience that prompted you to take on this project?

I confess that it hadn’t occurred to me to write a book about maps and storytelling. But then an acquisitions editor at Esri Press raised the idea, and I immediately jumped on it. My work at National Geographic had largely been in the print realm, and my career at Esri was all about web-based storytelling. And my stints at both spanned the dawn of the digital age, when technology and media platforms were going through dramatic transformations. Retracing my work at both organizations provided a nice framework for talking about the evolving role of maps in storytelling.

How do you envision it impacting the way people view maps and storytelling?

I’d love to think that the book might inspire GIS professionals to tell more stories about their work—the data they use, the insights they gain — to broad audiences. I hope the book makes people appreciate the peculiar power of maps: how dense they are with information, how they provide an additional dimension to storytelling, how they add richness and context to narratives. And I hope they’ll use this potent mix of maps and multimedia to positive ends — to inform and inspire people about the interconnectedness of our planet, nature, and human culture.

Who is your target audience — do you hope to inspire not only cartographers but also general readers or educators in particular?

I’m thrilled that ArcGIS StoryMaps have given GIS professionals a means to share their insights.   But I do hope that a much broader audience — essentially anyone who wants to tell place-based stories — will benefit from the book. I’m especially gratified that so many educators have embraced StoryMaps and are challenging their students to create stories. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect that at least some students are discovering the exciting worlds of GIS and geography via the stories they’ve been assigned to create.

Can you share an example from your book where maps have powerfully communicated a message or shifted perspectives?

I hesitate to spotlight a single story, but one of my favorites is “World’s Longest Mule Deer Migration” by the University of Oregon Geography Department and the Wyoming Migration Initiative. It combines tracking data, which I always find spellbinding, with land use and land management data to show that, even in the nation’s least populous state, wildlife must navigate a series of subdivisions, fence lines, roads, and other hazards. The story features “Deer 55” as the hero of the story, using an individual to exemplify a much broader issue.

How has the field of cartography changed over the years, and how does your book reflect these changes?

When I arrived at National Geographic in 1983, the cartographic division employed about a hundred people who worked amidst a sea of flat files and light tables. When I left in 2010, the staff was smaller by more than half, the furnishings were flat-screen monitors and hard drives, and their output was greater than ever, thanks to productivity-boosting GIS and production tools. A focus of the book is how maps designed for PCs, tablets, and smartphones suffer from limited screen real estate but benefit hugely from pan-and-zoom functions, interactivity, and animation, which enables what we call map choreography.

What personal experiences or lessons from your career are you most excited to share in the book?

Readers might be surprised by the fact that ArcGIS StoryMaps had a predecessor. During my latter years at National Geographic, we created a web-based storytelling app called “GeoStories” that combined images and maps to present virtual tours and place-based narratives. It enjoyed very modest early success before being quietly retired about 10 years ago. There are various reasons for its failure, one of which might have been that it was a little too far ahead of its time.

Storytelling through maps is central to your work. In your opinion, what role do maps play in making complex information more accessible to a broader audience?

Maps pack huge amounts of information into a form that most people find easy to interpret. The human mind has a remarkable ability to mentally project patterns on a page or screen onto the real world. As long as maps are carefully designed and not overloaded with detail (and that’s a pretty important qualifier!), they speak a visual language that’s almost universal.

What to leave off of a map can be nearly as important as what you include. Similarly, for map design, I’m constantly trying to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio: eliminating extraneous line work, graticules, neatlines, and labels where appropriate… and choreographing maps in series so that no single map needs to carry too great a burden. When we produce a story, we often compile a multi-layer web map, turn the layers off, and then make the layers visible sequentially within a narrative. That’s the “choreography” I mentioned; it makes maps dance and sing, and marries them intimately to the stories within which they reside.

How has the role of technology, particularly GIS, evolved in the field of cartography during your career, and what exciting developments do you foresee in the near future?

I remember, during my early stints in Nat Geo’s map division, doing a lot of wishing, in particular “If we only had the data…” and “If we only had the processing power.” Finding data can still be a challenge, but for the most part we’re overwhelmed with vast amounts of geospatial data to which we can apply computer power that we could barely even dream about 30 or 40 years ago. Those trends will continue, with an additional boost of unknowable nature and extent from artificial intelligence. I leave the thrilling and terrifying promise of AI for my successors to figure out!

As the Chief Cartographer at National Geographic, how did your experiences shape your approach to map-making and storytelling?

One big lesson I learned is how passionate people can be about maps. At one point we decided to add “Arabian Gulf” as a secondary label for the Persian Gulf on our World Atlas plates. What we didn’t realize was that Iranians are justly proud of their Persian heritage and see the alternate name as an act of political aggression. We received a firestorm of angry emails from Iranians and Iranian Americans. So I’ve learned to be a bit more sensitive and cautious about making maps!

If we go back a little, could you share with us the story behind the creation of Esri StoryMaps? What inspired you to merge cartography and storytelling in this innovative way?

There was a long process of experimentation, but at its simplest, we had an early conviction that the new medium of the web could be harnessed to present narratives that could combine maps, text, and images, and that these media could be more powerful in combination than they could be on their own. What we now call “classic” story maps were the result of many months of experimentation in combining and interacting with maps and multimedia.

I should add that we weren’t the sole inventors of multimedia narratives. Our main contribution was to make maps an integral part of stories and to democratize storytelling by creating intuitive builder functions that enabled code-free story authoring.

Looking back on your career, are there any particular projects or moments that have deeply influenced your views on the intersection of cartography, technology, and storytelling?

This may not precisely answer your question, but I’ve gradually come to realize that my career can be summarized in two verbs. At National Geographic our mission was to inform millions of readers and viewers about the world. At Esri our mission has been to enable people to use our tools to tell their own stories. Both are worthy efforts, I think, and both have been immensely rewarding. But there’s something uniquely gratifying about coming upon a gorgeous, informative, and inspiring story created using our platform.