Choreographing Maps: Scroll-and-Tell with Mapbox

Maps are fixed in time and space. Small multiples and animated timelines help structure them into a story. Even then, fully loaded maps can be dense and demand effort from readers to see patterns and infer meaning.

With scroll-and-tell maps, you can direct the viewer’s eye and guide attention to what matters. You can pan and zoom into specific locations to shift focus, highlight a region at a time, fade out excess detail and reveal layers step-by-step in sync with text and annotations. Pacing information this way eases cognitive load and creates a sense of journey: along a river, across a city, through time, where readers move through geography and narrative at the same time.

This approach is very useful in narrative building. The technique sits at the intersection of data visualisation, cartography, storytelling, and interface design. While it involves tools such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript or GIS, deep coding skills are not required to build scroll-based map stories.

In this hands-on workshop, we will use Mapbox as a low-code framework for scrollytelling. Participants will plan, storyboard, and build a story from start to end using a customisable template, a wrapper around technical tools that can be tailored to their own work in the future.

Who is this workshop for? The workshop will benefit data communicators, designers, researchers, journalists, and storytellers who want to create dynamic, interactive, story-driven map experiences that are engaging, memorable, and easy to follow. Prior experience with Flourish, Datawrapper, or QGIS may help but is not necessary.

How will participants engage? What is the workshop journey? In a do-along format, participants will follow a live demo to recreate a scroll-based map story, learning to layer information and choreograph map movements. We will work with an example that incorporates multiple geographic layers, including shapefiles, geojsons, simple csvs with lat-long data, and spatial layers such as land-use and land-cover. Participants will storyboard the narrative in Figma, clean and style layers in QGIS, and export them to Mapbox. Using HTML and JavaScript, we will layer the narrative and bring the map to life, with each step demonstrated live for participants to follow along.

What will participants leave with? What will participants be able to do afterward? By the end of the workshop, participants will have a working prototype of their first scrolly-map story, a reusable template, and a simple storyboarding framework for future projects. They will learn a practical workflow to craft map-based narratives in their own domains, such as climate, environment, urban development, elections, historical events, where this technique is highly effective.

What real-world challenge anchors this session? Many practitioners face a gap between making maps and telling stories with them. Static visuals or reliance on developer support for interactivity often limit their choices. This workshop provides a practical starting point for participants to create their own interactive, guided map stories.

Constraints and limitations To fit the session timeframe, we will work with small datasets and a pre-designed story template. We will also talk about when scrollytelling is most effective and when it is not, covering challenges such as scroll fatigue, maintaining continuity, and situations where open, exploratory interaction may be more appropriate than a guided narrative.