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Interactive Storytelling with MapLibre

Some stories are best told with a map. Data journalists covering changing conditions in a population's demographics, the environment, an international conflict, or telling a simple travel story frequently provide geographic context in their graphics.

This template is designed to accelerate building out a "scrollytelling" map story. The primary input is a story broken into sections (chapters), each hooked to a particular view of a map.

This template is based on Mapbox's storytelling template but has been customized to work with MapLibre instead. The template can be self-hosted with your own tiles, online or offline, either as static HTML or using Node. To work with gzipped vector tiles, you will need to use Node.

Prerequisites

This template is for data journalists and digital storytellers of any kind. No coding experience is required.

If you are planning to include some custom map layers, you will need some familiarity with the MapLibre style specifications, or use MapTiler or Maputnik to design your own style.

The template does not rely on any particular CSS framework or fonts. There are some basic styles in the head of the HTML file that can be changed, so feel free to adapt and add to these to match your site and story brand. You can place your own image assets in the images/ directory.

Getting Started

Download this repository as a ZIP file using the button above, and unzip it. If you are using git, clone this repository.

Make a copy of config.js.template and name it config.js. Open the new config.js file in your text editor.

Steps

  1. Prepare your map tiles and design a MapLibre style. This template looks for a map style.json in the map/ directory. You could also place all of your map assets (tiles, sprites, font glyphs) here. You could change this, however.

    • To test out the template, you could use the MapLibre demo tiles. Download the repo and place it in this directory, and change the paths for fonts, sprites and sources to your hosting path.

  2. Set the configuration options as described in the next section.

  3. Add as many chapters in your template as needed. You'll need a , between each section, but no comma at the end. Here is what a chapter looks like:

  4. Fill out your sections as needed. Give each section a unique name in the section id property. This will become the HTML div id, so avoid spaces in the name. Set the location properties for each chapter. The title, description properties are optional. The description supports HTML tags. If you have an image that goes with that section of the story, add the path to the image in the image property.

  5. Figure out how you are hosting the template. If you are deploying it as static HTML, simply place the files somewhere, open the index.html file in a browser, and voila! If you are deploying it with Node, you will need to run some additional steps, as listed in Deployment below.

Configuration Options

Please see CONFIG.md.

Deployment

Host the files in this repository in the same directory. You can either deploy this tool as static HTML, or as a server using Node and Express.js.

For both options, you have to set absolute paths in your style.json for the sources, sprites, and font glyphs.

As static HTML

This template will work as static HTML when hosted on a web-accessible location. Simply place the dist/, images/, map/ (if you are hosting your own map and tiles), config.js, index.html, and sources.js (if you are using it) in the same directory. Accessing that directory in a browser should load the story map.

For hosting online, if you don't know where to start, look into GitHub Pages or Netlify.

Using Node.js

You can deploy this template as a server using Node.

First, make sure you have Node and npm (Node Package Manager) installed.

Next, in the directory, run npm install to set up your node packages. You can also run npm run build to bundle your scripts. (The repo comes with a pre-compiled bundle.js file, but this guarantees you bundle the latest versions of MapLibre etc.)

To initialize the server, run npm run serve. The default port is 5000; if you want to change the port, run npm run serve -- <port_number>, replacing <port_number> with your desired port number. For example, to use port 8080, you would run npm run serve -- 8080.

We are using Express.js to initialize the server and to handle gzipped vector tiles (with file extension .vector.pbf).

Built with

Storytelling with Maps using MapLibre Workshop

@fmvaldezg from Temple University Libraries created a Storytelling with Maps using MapLibre Workshop, which could be helpful for learning how to use this template.

Acknowledgment

This template is based on Mapbox's Storytelling Template, which works great with maps designed in their Studio tool but requires a Mapbox access token.