Narrative Transportation and the Potential for Cartographers to Create Storytelling Maps That Transport Their Readers

Narrative transportation – the extent to which a reader is drawn into a story – is a new term for cartographers borrowed from social psychology. Transporting stories lead readers to develop strong emotions and motivations about the content, physically and psychologically immerse themselves, and take on beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours implied in the story. In this article, the authors review the literature on narrative transportation to provide concrete suggestions for cartographers designing storytelling maps. Specifically, they describe how to integrate the key concepts of narrative transportation – cognition, emotion, and imagery – into storytelling maps. Second, they describe how cartographers should hold back information to create intrigue, make causality and non-linear aspects of a story explicit, and create plots and characters that readers can identify to better tell stories with maps. Finally, they conclude by describing how research cartographers might use narrative transportation and specifically the transportation scale to measure how much readers are transported into a storytelling map.