How to Tell Stories with Maps

School of Data has published a good round-up of narrative mapping platforms. The article includes a few examples of good story maps and explores some of the mapping libraries which can be used to create interactive maps to annotate or narrate a story.

Seven Ways to Create a Storymap reviews popular narrative mapping libraries such as Knight Lab's StoryMap JS, Esri StoryMaps and CartoDB's Odyssey.js. It even mentions my own story map demo created using waypoints.js with Leaflet, JourneyMap.

One of the examples listed in the School of Data article is new to me. LeafletPlayback is a very neat Leaflet library which allows you to animate GPS Tracks, in the form of GeoJSON objects, on a Leaflet map. You can see the library in action on this example map, which animates markers along four separate tracks. The map includes video type playback controls which also allow you to control the playback of the animated marker tracks.

The LeafletPlayback library provides a great way for developers to animate a journey on a map. Using the library you can animate a marker along a polyline, with the marker's movement synchronized to a time-stamp in your GeoJSON object.