This week I had the chance to attend a webinar hosted by the program that I’ve been using as a part of my project; ArcGIS StoryMaps. I went in hoping to get a few tricks of the trade and maybe find a cool new way of displaying the product of this research fellowship, but the webinar provided a totally new perspective on the whole program. I hadn’t really considered all the different ways that the program could be used, instead just thinking about how it was suited to my here and now without considering the future. I definitely have a bad habit of doing that.
However, the webinar, and the projects that it showcased, showed me how StoryMaps (and likely many other programs intended for or that I see as being solely for academic purposes) have as many uses as we choose to give to them. One of the presentations at the webinar was how StoryMaps was being used basically as a website for information to draw people into moving to a city in Minnesota. People discussed a million and one different projects that had been hosted on the StoryMaps server. People have done instructions and tutorials, used it instead of PowerPoint, as art or business portfolios, as a call to action in activist movements, to tell the stories of personal trips. One that I know for sure that I will definitely be using is the idea of using StoryMaps as a multimedia resume.
You can display and make accessible pretty much anything on StoryMaps. The opportunities for use of this platform are endless, and I never would’ve considered using it for anything more than this research fellowship and maybe a school project if I hadn’t attended this webinar. This is one of the many things that I have loved about doing this fellowship: the constant learning of new things and the immense amount of transferable skills that this experience has given me.