Storymap JS feels a lot like PowerPoint with some extra pizzazz, or like a Prezzie (which I loved to use when I was younger). This whole thing certainly took some time to get used to. This is definitely more of an exploration into Storymap JS using some information I found vaguely interesting in order to experiment more with the software and see how it worked, so there isn’t a super clear narrative I established other than that there were Indigenous people in northern Illinois, most if not all of them were gone by the 1830s, and that now Lake County is super populated and full of a lot of different things (as is expected for a suburb of one of the largest cities in the world). It’s a bit of funky software, and it’s pretty straightforward in terms of use, as well as feels like it has a relatively user-friendly interface. It’s not the most beautiful or glorious thing I’ve ever created, but I also didn’t spend too much time trying to make it so, as I was focused on getting the basics down. It felt a lot like making a presentation in PowerPoint or Google Slides, but a bit more complicated? That could just be because all of the images and links were included straight on the page instead of being things that you add in as you go. It also was cool, though, to be able to see a preview version of what the whole Storymap would look like when it was completed, so I was able to visualize the presentation as I went. It was cool to be able to zoom in on different parts of Lake County as I went to visualize different parts of Lake County, but it was frustrating that sometimes it wouldn’t zoom in with the presentation as it went. Overall, it’s definitely got a bit of a learning curve but it does make some interesting presentations and propose an interesting way to create a narrative in history.
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Annemarie– I really enjoyed looking through your story map of colonialism in Lake County. This is a great start, and I appreciate your emphasis on trying to learn the software first before focusing on the historical narrative. You still have lots of great information here, and it shows both the potential and limitations of platforms like Story Maps JS. What stands out the most to me is how inherently colonial this platform is; from the user interface there is little control over the look and function of the map. We always see colonial borders and boundaries, which make it difficult to envision how this was (and continues to be) a Native space.
I have always found it interesting that Story Map JS uses a “slide” system for building the map. Timeline JS uses a Google Spreadsheet, which I find to be more useful because you are transforming your content into “data” and making it machine-readable. I’m not sure that the “slide-building” experience is the best, but I agree that it is nice to see your work being visualized in real time. To me, Story Map JS has always been a solid beginner-level tool, but there are more powerful tools out there for story mapping (they just have a steeper learning curve).