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

This article focuses on the concept of narrative transportation—the psychological immersion of a reader into a story—and its application to storytelling map design in cartography. Drawing from social psychology research, it outlines how cartographers can enhance storytelling maps by integrating cognition, emotion, and imagery, as well as by employing techniques such as withholding information to build suspense, clarifying causal relationships, and developing relatable characters and plots. The article illustrates these principles through examples of both interactive and static storytelling maps, including a multimedia map of the 2023 Maui wildfire and a historical voyageur’s map. Additionally, it highlights the Transportation Scale (TS), a validated tool from social psychology, as a means for research cartographers to measure how effectively storytelling maps engage and transport their audiences.