User Personas

These 10 personas and hypothetical scenarios represent the type of activity we seek to empower with MapStory.

1. I’m a geospatial analyst

I want to use MapStory to complete a spatial history of sub-national political boundaries (districts) of Afghanistan in order to support our research on their political situation. I have a few print maps that I will rectify in warper.mapstory.org and upload to MapStory, so they are available. I will probably also use QGIS to trace these maps and generate a shapefile with a few timeslices to upload to MapStory, for starters. I will make that StoryLayer editable, and begin adding and editing polygons as I learn more in my research. When I’ve got the StoryLayer complete and accurate, I will use it in a MapStory, so that I can add contextual information in the Chapter Info and StoryPins in order to better explain the phenomena to my supervisor.

2. I’m an NGO worker

I am the geospatial lead for an environmental NGO. I generate dozens of historical maps (shapefiles and dot maps) during my work, and I’d love to use MapStory as a place to share those with the public on an ongoing basis, similar to the way my organization uses Scribd to host and share our PDF documents. I want to build an Organization Page where I can curate the content available there.

3. I’m a government agency employee

I work for a local/state/federal public parks office. I have access to lots of data that has been tax-payer funded and covers everything from the species to plants to major events and even crimes tracked in our parks over the years. I’d love a quick and simple way to share this data with the public.

4. I’m a journalist…

I love maps, and I usually have to recruit a member of my digital team to help me make custom maps for my articles, or to find a map elsewhere that I can get permission to use. MapStory is great, because the map products are all openly licensed, and I can easily assess the mapstoryteller who created it, and the sources behind. Also, I can just grab the embed link below the map and pop it into every article. I could also make a StoryLayer editable, and embed that StoryLayer right into my newspaper, and run a new type of crowd-editing journalism project.

5. I’m a librarian/archivist

I work at a community library. We have lots of old maps in our archives that I’d love to more easily share with the public...without having to host my own new website or server. I’d also love to engage the patrons that walk into our doors by showing them animated maps of their community...and even having them edit and crowdsource data for us!

6. I’m a citizen scientist and digital humanist…

For years, I’ve been collecting annexation data on cities – showing how they’ve spread and changed over time. I’d like to use MapStory to upload all of these datasets as StoryLayers. I’d also like to merge many of these StoryLayers so eventually I could show a single StoryLayer of “how the US became defined”. I imagine myself and dozens of other MapStorytellers using my StoryLayers as the basis of their own mapstories.

7. I’m a professor…

I’m a professor of history. Every year I teach the History of New York City to my undergraduates. I’d like to use MapStory in 3 ways. First, I will assign my students to search for New York related StoryLayers and contribute edits to them, based on their research. Second, I will ask my students to CREATE a new StoryLayer in MapStory that focuses on a specific theme, such as the spread of the NY Subway, and have them contribute features to the StoryLayer as they gather research. Finally, I will ask them to produce a multi-chapter mapstory explaining more about the why behind the phenomena they researched. (I.E. why did the NY Subway spread as it did?)

8. I’m the head of the Railroad Association of America

My organization has an interest in engaging train enthusiasts around the world in preserving the history of American railroad. I’ll use MapStory as a way to engage my members, by launching an Initiative to version edit railroad StoryLayers. I will get industry and individual partners to participate and help Sponsor MapStory as a way of saying thanks for providing this service.

9. I’m a young student

I’m a middle school student seeking to use MapStory for a National History Day project. I want to make a mapstory about the spread of chocolate throughout time. My MapStory will use two StoryLayers for: 1) the spread of cocoa farming and 2) the spread of commercial chocolate companies. I have a google spreadsheet where I’ve been collecting points for my StoryLayers but need some guidance on how my spreadsheet needs to be structured in order to work in MapStory. I have a few storypins I’d like to add about key events in the history of chocolate and would like to break my story up into a few chapters to emphasize different periods of history. Also, my research showed me that cocoa farming began before 0 AD so I need to be able to add dates from BCE.

10. I’m a college student

I’m a GIS Master’s student. I want to make a MapStory as part of my master’s thesis project on SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Sydrome). My MapStory will show SIDS deaths in the US from 1995-2013, as well as a cholorepleth StoryLayer showing deaths in states. My MapStory will just be 1 chapter, and will use a few StoryBoxes to zoom in on key cases I want to highlight. I’ll use StoryPins to show this additional information. Thankfully, someone has already uploaded a SIDS StoryLayer, so I will start by using their layer. Since its editable I will improve it however I can before using it as part of my MapStory.