Integrated Storymaps: a new paradigm of visual storytelling in Heurist

Heurist is a data management platform for Humanities scholars, hosted at the University of Sydney since 2005 (Johnson 2008; Searle and Johnson 2014; “Home” n.d.). Using Heurist, researchers can create flexible, robust and sustainable research databases on the web. Though originally conceived as a data management tool, Heurist has evolved over the years into a platform for data-driven storytelling.

Heurist enables data-driven storytelling through its library of widgets. Heurist widgets can be embedded on a project’s website, allowing the researcher to present their data in an interactive and structured way. In the backend interface, the researcher can choose which records to make public, define ‘Filters’, ‘Rulesets’ and ‘Faceted Searches’ that enable visitors to navigate the database, and create ‘Custom Reports’ that determine how records are displayed. These Filters, RuleSets, Faceted Searches and Custom Reports can then be arranged on the website using Heurist widgets.

This talk was the opening talk from a panel devoted to digital storytelling in Heurist. The speaker is Dr Ian Johnson, Heurist’s designer, who explains the philosophy of Heurist’s ‘widgets’ and describe our new work on multi-channel StoryMaps. His talk was followed by talks from three Heurist users, who presented their experience on data-driven storytelling in Heurist at all stages of the project life-cycle.

As Dr Johnson explains, research in Digital Humanities is often stymied by the lack of general-purpose tools. Many projects develop specific tools or websites, which become moribund when project funding runs out and developers move on to new positions. At Heurist, we redress this problem with our philosophy of mutualised development. When a project requests a particular feature, we implement it as a general-purpose tool, integrated with existing widgets that do the heavy lifting (facet search, result set, map, timeline, custom report). The mutualised development philosophy reduces development time, makes it easy to integrate new features into existing webpages, and allows all Heurist users to benefit from the contributions of a particular project.

A key example of this philosophy is Heurist's new Story Map widget. Story Maps are a simple way of visualising a narrative which evolves across time and space. Our challenge was to build multi-channel Story Maps into a rich web-based database of people built by the Géo-Récits project (https://georecits.hypotheses.org/). allowing facet selection of individuals from the database and simultaneous visualisation of their lives on a coordinated map, timeline and content-rich narrative in order to reveal their parallelism and intersections.