What is a Story?
Updated October 6th, 2020
This style guide covers content recommendations, style basics, and features related to writing stories. Urban Archive stories allow creators on our platform to tell place-based stories using maps, text, and archival imagery. There are many creative ways to create stories on Urban Archive. Here are a few examples of stories we really like:
This story is granular and provides the history of a single site.
These stories are expansive and examine an era of public art and document historic buildings.
These stories are thematic, educational, and whimsical.
Some stories are walkable! A story can be a general tour of a specific area.
Authorship
On any story you create, your organization’s name will be added to the byline under the title to ensure proper accreditation. If you’re writing a community story or would like to further specify the author’s name at your organization, we recommend using the introduction to do so.
Title
The title of your story will be what users see on the Urban Archive homepage, on your organization’s profile page, and in search results. The best titles are concise, descriptive, and engaging.
This field is not mark-down compatible, meaning you can’t use bold, italics, or hyperlinks here. Please use title-case when writing your title.
Here are some examples of titles we love:
Introduction
Your introduction is where you’ll want to establish your story’s topics and theme. This section can also include links to exhibitions, events, web-pages, or further resources that are relevant to the story. The bulk of the narrative should be told in the text under each image.
Like all body-fields, there is a 2,000 character limit to your introduction.
Here’s an example of a story introduction we love:
Stops / Images
“Stops” in stories appear as points on the map. These stops, or points, represent images that are tied to locations on Urban Archive. You can use any image on Urban Archive as a stop in your story.
The logo that you see overlaid on the image denotes what institution the image belongs to. However, the byline at the top of the story is how we assign story authorship.
As you scroll through a story, the map will move to center each location on the map.
You can have multiple “stops” listed at the same location. Here’s an example of a story that does just that.
With each stop, you’ll be able to add text which serves as the body of your story. You can reorder, delete, or add stops at any point while you are editing the story.
To learn more about creating or editing stories, click these links for tutorials.
Body Text
Under each image, or “stop,” in your Story, you can write your story’s body text. This is where you’ll tell the bulk of your narrative.
While your narrative doesn’t need to reference the image, the image or site should make sense in the broader context of your text. For example, if you are writing about the Astor Place Riots, the image doesn’t have to be of the riots, but it should be of Astor Place, not the Brooklyn Bridge.
We have found that our platform is best suited for stories that are short and to-the-point, as opposed to long-form articles. For this reason, each body-text field has a limit of 2000 characters. If you want to expand on a point, you can always add another image.
Spell Check / Grammarly
Our platform does not have a built-in spell-check, but it does integrate with Grammarly: a free tool that provides spelling and grammar feedback and can be added as a plugin for any browser. Once added to your browser, it will provide spellcheck to all text-fields on Urban Archive.
Hyperlinks / Markdown
Urban Archive does not have formatting tools as part of our user interface. However, our platform is markdown compatible. This makes it possible for you to add formatting elements in almost any text field on the platform. This guide will show you how to add links to your content on Urban Archive.
Tags
A tag is a short descriptive line of text that is affixed to a piece of content. They can be added to stories to connect them to other related content. This guide shows you how to add tags.