About Story Mapper®

Humanities Tennessee is nearing completion of the first project developed with its Story Mapper software application — a web-based guide to the Unicoi Turnpike Trail, which Humanities Tennessee has developed in partnership with the Tennessee Overhill Association. This guide shows, through a Google Maps™ interface, points of interest on this historic trail. Associated with each point of interest are digital image, audio or video files that provide a interpretive narrative of the trail.

Story Mapper, which has been developed with support from NEH's "We the People" initiative, is largely a database of digital texts and images, each of which is tied to a place, or multiple places, on a map through geospatial coordinates. Additionally, Story Mapper enables minimally trained volunteers, with the assistance of scholars, to create narratives, accompanied by maps, that provide a path through these places and their accompanying texts and images or to string these texts and images together in such a way as to create a narrative of a place. The assumption behind the design is that Humanities Tennessee will not itself be providing content, but will provide training and support to its partnering organizations and individuals who can use the software to produce cultural walking or driving tours, cultural resource inventories, virtual museum exhibitions, K–12 lesson plans, etc.

The second group of projects produced with Story Mapper will be a result of Humanities Tennessee's project entitled, We the People of Tennessee — Stories of Land and Place, another project supported by the "We the People" initiative. Through collecting oral histories, this project seeks to discover the local narratives that give a place meaning. These narratives (all transcribed, but including some audio and video) will be the basis of web-based walking and driving tours of each community. Partner organizations and their projects include:

  • the Dyer County Historical Society which is examining "Bottom Lands" and the significance of these disappearing communities along the Mississippi River;
  • the School of Urban Affairs and Public Policy at University of Memphis, which has teamed college students with neighborhood middle school students to interview residents about the rich local heritage of Memphis's Greenlaw, a largely African-American neighborhood facing gentrification pressures;
  • the Woodbine Community Organization, which will tell the story of the cultural changes over time as this Nashville neighborhood evolved to reflect the changing ethnic demographics of the city;
  • the Elkton Historical Society, which will focus on the development of southeastern Giles County including settlement, growth, and changes evidenced by commercial activity, transportation, and culture;
  • the Tennessee Overhill Heritage Association which, in a project called "From Furs to Factories," is exploring the changing economies of communities in three rural Appalachian counties;
  • and the International Storytelling Center and the Heritage Alliance of Jonesborough which will examine the decline of Jonesborough as a regional commercial center and its rise as a regional center for heritage tourism.

For more information about the Story Mapper project, or to be notified when the first Story Mapper sites are online, contact Tim Henderson at 615-770-0006, ext. 13, or by email at tim@humanitiestennessee.org.

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