Deep maps,
many authors

What is The MapTool?

The MapTool is a platform for building interactive, place-based narratives. It was designed so that the act of mapmaking is itself an interpretive act — a way of constructing arguments about space, memory, and community rather than simply illustrating them.

At its core, The MapTool lets authors pin coordinates to places and attach text, images, audio, video, or web content — building a rich, navigable layer of meaning directly on top of geography. It supports multiple authors and perspectives coexisting on the same map, making collaborative, polyvocal storytelling visible and tractable.

Research context

The MapTool emerged from the tradition of deep mapping — a practice that layers history, personal narrative, ecological observation, and cultural knowledge onto a single place. Where conventional GIS treats a map as a neutral record of facts, deep mapping treats it as an argument, a story, a site of contestation.

The project draws on scholarship in digital humanities, place-based education, and community-engaged research. It has been used by university researchers, public arts organizations, and community groups to document sites of memory, guide audiences through physical environments, and build archives rooted in specific geographies.

A full account of the methodology and case studies is available in the peer-reviewed paper published in Digital Studies / Le champ numérique.

Three ways to use it

The MapTool supports three distinct relationships between authors, maps, and audiences: scholars using it directly to spatialize a body of research; organizations using it as a wayfinding tool that sends audiences to physical locations; and teams using it as a behind-the-scenes authoring tool that powers a separate mobile app or website.

This flexibility — combined with support for offline and location-triggered experiences — makes it useful across a wide range of contexts, from academic publication to public art to community documentation.