Managing Scholarly Outputs in a Proprietary Platform: Exploring the Implications of Esri Story Maps for Spatial Digital Humanities Preservation

Abstract

Spatial digital humanities projects often struggle with sustainability and preservation. Interactive, engaging websites require consistent maintenance to function well. As a result, projects rise and fall with grant cycles while technical staff face an ever-increasing portfolio of projects to maintain. For the past decade, Esri’s Story Maps platform has offered a way to combine maps, text, images, and other multimedia with relatively little technical overhead for the end user. This has had substantial influence on spatial digital humanities, expanding opportunities for a wide range of scholars and organizations to share archival research publicly. The challenge of preserving this work looms large, however, as the retirement date for the “classic” version of the platform approaches. Based on an effort at the University of Minnesota to contact authors for hundreds of public-facing story maps, this paper reflects on the difficulty of managing scholarly outputs in a system not primarily designed for that purpose and of representing web-based work within the library record. More broadly it asks, what does it mean for spatial digital humanities that so much scholarship is hosted and organized within one proprietary platform?

Keywords:

• Spatial digital humanities
• story maps
• preservation

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my profound gratitude to Shana Crosson for helping strategize about this preservation challenge, contacting many classic story map users during Phase 1 of outreach, and maintaining excellent relationships with spatial digital humanities projects across the university. Thanks to Pete Wiringa for helping obtain administrative data for the U of MN ArcGIS Online organization and interpreting the messiness of the data. Thanks to Jane Lindelof for assistance working with Salesforce and sending mass emails.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Reference rot occurs when the link for something that is cited no longer leads to the intended work either because it is no longer accessible at that location (i.e. link rot) or because the material available at the link has changed (i.e. content drift) (Hennessey and Ge 2013; Klein et al. 2014; Coble and Karlin 2023).

2 Changes in branding over the years complicates terminology on this topic. For this article I will be using “story map” when referring to projects built using the classic templates and as a broader term applying to all iterations of Esri map-based storytelling products. When referring to projects created with the unified builder released in 2019, I will use “StoryMaps.”

3 According to Esri, at the time of writing more than 7000 universities use their products. Esri products are used at many scales of government including 20,000 municipalities, thousands of counties, in all fifty US states, and many areas of the US federal government. They are also used in industries ranging from construction to conservation and by 50% of the Fortune 500 companies (Esri Media and Analyst Relations 2023).

4 While some projects can be transferred into a free public account, StoryMaps that contain hosted web services or tile layers require a subscription licence to function. This cost can be a further barrier to transferring content for long-term management.

5 Starting in October 2025, Esri will review the use and functionality of each of the classic story map templates several times a year. Templates that “no longer work as expected” will be removed from ArcGIS Online and the stories that have been created with that template will no longer be available (Evans 2022).

6 The U of MN has long had an email-for-life policy allowing alumni to continue to use their university issued email address indefinitely (if they signed into it at least once every 90 days.) It will end this policy for incoming undergraduate students and will begin rolling back email for other alumni in 2024 (University of Minnesota Information Technology 2023).

7 Keywords used in the filter were: “test,” “delete,” “exercise,” “practice,” “tutorial," “lab,” “north shore,” “state park,” “historic site,” “election,” “governor,” “congressional,” “senate,” “auditor,” “secretary of state,” “presidential,” “2018,” and “welcome to san diego.” The flagged story maps were inspected to reduce false positives.