As a kid, I grew up watching the Rocky movies, shadow boxing with my brothers and doing push-ups during the workout montages.  One on my favorite montages was in Rocky II when Rocky runs through the whole city of Philadelphia, thronged by adoring fans as he runs to the top of the stairs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art (and yes, of course I re-enacted that scene when I was there).

Given that history, I was thrilled to reading an article in the Philly Post by Dan McQuade entitled “How Far did Rocky Go is His Training run in Rocky II?”  This article identifies the locations that were used in the movie to evoke such a strong sense of place.  Earlier versions of this article did not have a map and I wanted to see the images and the map together.  That was enough of a reason for me to make both an online map on arcgis.com and an interactive web mapping application with an ESRI storymap template. 

10 Rocky Map

The online map opening in arcgis.com as has sequential pop-ups that show images from the run.  Nice, but not quite what I had envisioned. 

11 Rocky WebApp

This ESRI storymap allows the user to more freely move between the pictures, map and text.  More and more, we are seeing that maps can help us tell stories.  If you would like to learn how to create your own storymap, read this earlier article I posted for my mapping students.