Apprenance transmédia § Formations

"In November 2013, Google enhanced its mapping services by launching Tour Builder, an application dedicated to mapping stories. A year earlier, in October 2012, ESRI  had already created its own application for narrative mapping: Story Maps. The arrival of these two giants in the world of narrative cartography added to the already diverse field of online story mapping applications such as Neatline, Tripline, MapStory, Maptia, Trippermap, and Atlascine, pointing to a real surge in this new form of cartographic expression.

The different locations of the trajectory of a fictional hero or a migrant across multiple borders are straightforward to portray using these tools. However, it becomes much more complicated to map the emotions and perceptions experienced during these journeys, as well as the associated spatiotemporal structures unique to every story. Generally, space (and even time) is neither Cartesian, nor continuous in narratives. It varies due to the fluid structure of events, descriptions, memories, and the imaginary. Maps and stories simply do not have the same geography. Although the relevance of mapping stories for understanding social phenomena is increasingly recognized, it is worth asking at what point online story mapping applications can deal with the spatiotemporal complexity of stories."

– M@ppemonde