Saturday, April 20, 2019

The Language of Story Maps


The Pudding's Why EU Regions are Redrawing Their Borders is a hugely impressive story map illustrating how European countries are redrawing regional borders in order to qualify for more European Union funding. As you progress through The Pudding's story the map is used to illustrate the economic health of EU regions and where regional borders are being redrawn.

The map sidebar includes a number of highlight links which are used to pick out extra details in the map. Hover over these highlight links in the text and related features are picked out on the map. So not only does the map update as you scroll through the text but the text itself includes highlighted text links to provide further explanation of the data. The colors of these highlight links are defined by the data. For example, in the sidebar text the highlight link for the 'least developed regions' is the same color as the least developed regions on the map.

These colored highlight links are such a useful feature in a story map that I've updated my example choropleth story map on Glitch to include colored highlight links. Scroll through Measles in Europe and hover over the highlighted text in the map sidebar to pick out different features on the map. If you want to create your own choropleth story map using Leaflet.js then feel free to clone and copy the Measles in Europe map on Glitch.

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