Interactive Storytelling: 3D Maps with Mapbox GL JS v2

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Jan 12, 2021

Interactive Storytelling: 3D Maps with Mapbox GL JS v2

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Guest

Jan 12, 2021

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. We’ve designed a template to accelerate building a "scrollytelling" map story (code on github BSD 3-Clause License). This template is for data journalists and digital storytellers of any kind. No coding experience is required.

Last year, over a thousand people published stories using this template. Now, with the release of Mapbox GL JS version 2.0 and 135 million square kilometers of new high-resolution satellite imagery, storytelling with Mapbox is more powerful and beautiful than ever. A single change to the configuration enables 3D terrain, bringing new context to stories about travel, real estate, or the environment.

There are new features that put more control in the hands of the storyteller, from specifying the layout position of individual chapters, hiding chapters to trigger a map change without obscuring the view, controlling the speed of a layer transition, or choosing the color of the marker. Other new features enhance the impact of the story, like starting a slow map rotation animation for a particular chapter view, or calling a custom JavaScript function when entering a chapter. Use the custom function to include a data-driven graph alongside the chapter text, or to control other elements on the page, like toggling map legend visibility. For low-bandwidth regions or between distant map locations, skip a long map transition and just jump to the next view.

This release is also backwards compatible, so it’s easy to upgrade an existing story configuration file: drop in the new `index.html` file and the story will still work, then add new configuration options like `enable3dTerrain`.

Learn more about Interactive Storytelling, and get started building with the GitHub template.

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