Community Identity Mapping

Stories have been called the “DNA of culture” and are integral to cultural mapping. Inviting community members to identify the stories that say something important about what makes their community unique is a powerful way to engage the community in the cultural mapping process. Experience demonstrates that people are more activity engaged and receptive to creating new shared visions of the future if their collective past and present have been portrayed and validated in meaningful ways.

Community identity mapping is most effective when it solicits three kinds of stories:

• Stories that honor the past;
• Stories that celebrate the present;
• Stories that envision the future.

Stories can be gathered in community workshops or through web-based surveys. But new social media tools increasingly make it possible to have people contribute stories in multiple media – text, audio, video – and to make these stories accessible through tools such as Googlemaps.

The findings and stories identified through mapping can be captured and used for purposes such as creating theme-based tourism itineraries and tours of local cultural resources, illustrating themes and stories as part of interactive web maps and cultural portals build on cultural asset mapping results.