Fundamentally, Allen Carroll’s Telling Stories with Maps: Lessons from a Lifetime of Creating Place-Based Narratives is a book about using Esri’s ArcGIS StoryMaps service for creating digital narratives with maps. It’s of little use to anyone not using StoryMaps, but it’s not quite a user manual either. It presents the theory and practice of map-based storytelling, as applicable to the StoryMaps user base, with examples from Carroll’s long career, most notably at the National Geographic Society from 1983 to 2010, and then at Esri, where he went on to found their StoryMaps platform.

Carroll’s transition from National Geographic to Esri—a good chunk of Telling Stories with Maps serves as a memoir of Carroll’s working life—parallels a transition from analog to digital storytelling, and despite differences in medium, Carroll demonstrates that map-based narratives cover both the National Geographic maps (think the back sides of the map inserts) and interactive maps.

As StoryMaps emerged, one tool at a time, it presented a challenge: as Carroll notes, its users were GIS professionals who were not necessarily equipped to be storytellers—to be able to craft a narrative that held the attention of the reader. Telling Stories with Maps is an attempt to address that knowledge gap, with a bit of theory of narrative and a boatload of real-world examples (collected online here, because in-book screenshots can only do so much). As such it’s a book about what StoryMaps is for—what you can do with it, the best way to use it—rather than a step-by-step instruction manual.

I received an electronic review copy from the publisher.

Telling Stories with Maps
by Allen Carroll
Esri, 10 Jun 2025
Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop