M02-4: Embedding maps into your StoryMap

There are two ways of embedding maps into your StoryMap. This material should provide a short comparison of the two approaches highlighting the (dis-) advantages of each.

First, you can use maps hosted in ArcGIS Online. That can be web maps directly produced in ArcGIS Online through the map viewer or it can be maps/ layers you produced in ArcGIS Desktop and published them to your ArcGIS Online account. How to deal with that, you can see in this manual. As we concentrate our teaching for this summerschool on ArcGIS Online together with it's offer for ArcGIS StoryMaps, we emphasize to directly produce your maps in ArcGIS Online. Creating maps in ArcGIS Desktop, however, facilitates more opportunities to adapt your preferences for each step in an analysis. Maps from ArcGIS Online can be maps which you created by yourself, maps from your organization which are shared with you as well as maps provided by the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World.

Second way to produce maps for integration in StoryMaps is a new approach added to StoryMaps last year together with the new all-in-one builder. Now you create a so called express map directly in the builder.

Type of map	Features
web map from ArcGIS Online	Complex, comprehensive way of map producing. New feature-layers to use in your web map can be created directly in ArcGIS Online including complex attribute-tables. You can upload comma seperated value-files (.csv) and Excel-files (.xls(x)) as well as GOOGLE tables, GeoJSON-files, geo-tagged images, feature collections, zipped geodatabases or shapefiles and, as mentioned above, ArcGIS Desktop maps and documents. You can conduct a lot of analysis on the attribute-tables and likewise geometrically or statistically. Integration of pre-built maps/ files/ layers from ArcGIS Online, your organization or the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World is possible. Using the map action building block from the block palette in StoryMaps is only possible with integrated web maps from ArcGIS Online.
express map from StoryMap builder	Easy, fast maps for simple visualization. Use this feature directly built into your StoryMap builder for producing modern maps for mostly simple visualizations like tour stops or just to show locations. It's possible to draw (numbered) points, lines, polygons and annotations. You can add some attributes as text which are displayed as pop-ups. A quite nice function is that you can draw arrows in multiple ways to visualize flows or routings.