Homes to Ashes | Under Water

This portfolio piece is actually a pair of stories that were created to support an NSF Career Grant under Professor Robert Roth on interactive map design considerations. These stories are designed to exemplify a typical data journalism story that interweaves texts, graphics, and maps to drive the narrative. Particularly, they employ the long-form infographic format with the linearity of the narrative enforced by scrolling through the content. The narratives follow a typical three-act structure with a set-up, conflict, and resolution.

Besides the splash page videos, all the media in these two stories were created by me. I developed a hook in both stories by visualizing the extent of the natural disaster damage on the landscape. After delving into some broad context, I wanted the reader to get aquatinted to the characters in the stories by highlighting two counties with leader lines and captions. Per story, the two counties are differentially impacted by wildfires and hurricanes. The major disaster event of the Tubbs Fire or Hurricane Harvey inflicted concentrated damage on one of the counties but not the other. These differences are shown in the maps and accompanying graphics. The story comes full circle by juxtaposing the disaster event on the county that was not or minimally affected by the disaster in real life. This technique was designed to get the reader to generate empathy and to emphasize that these events could still have devastating effects if they happened elsewhere. Both stories used color, typography, and sequencing to establish a consistent mood. They end with a cliffhanger to hopefully elicit further interest in both topics.

Created using ArcGIS StoryMaps