From Songlines to the Cloud

About this storymap

From Songlines to the Cloud is a six-episode history of geography and spatial thinking written and narrated by Paul Strootman for EdGeoInnovations. This page retells it in time (the timeline at the bottom) and space (the map behind), with the podcast audio and full transcripts alongside.

How to use it

Scroll to move through the story. Each card moves the map and the timeline marker.
Click any dot or coloured band on the timeline to jump through time. Use ← → on a keyboard.
Press Listen to hear the episode for the part you are reading; the player sits under the header.
The map is always live: drag, zoom, tilt, and click a marker for its name. The URL updates so you can link to any moment.
Where the story mentions a historical map, a picture of it sits on the card. Click it to enlarge; the Source link opens the original scan.

The stack (all open, all free to host)

MapLibre GL JS renders the map and the globe in the browser.
OpenFreeMap serves the basemap from OpenStreetMap data (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL). The streets you see in Port-au-Prince and Regent's Park are the volunteer map in the story.
Natural Earth 1:110m country boundaries, packed into one PMTiles archive with Tippecanoe and read by HTTP range requests straight from GitHub Pages: no map server.
NASA GIBS Blue Marble imagery fades in for the satellite-era steps.
Places, routes and areas are small GeoJSON files built from a gazetteer script in the repository. Long voyages are drawn along great circles; several routes (Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Cook, Humboldt) and Mackinder's pivot area are deliberately simplified.
Scrollama ties scrolling to the map and timeline. Hosted on GitHub Pages.

Sources

Every claim on the cards comes from the episode scripts and the long-form review they are based on, which carries the full reference list. Read the transcripts here, or open the repository for the review, research notes and bibliography: github.com/edgeoinnovations-resources/history-of-geography.

Map pictures

The pictures of historical maps on the cards come from Wikimedia Commons (public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, as stated under each one) and, for Huntington's 1915 maps, from the Internet Archive's scan of Civilization and Climate. Small copies are stored with the site; the enlarged view loads the high-resolution original from Commons. Every picture links to its source page, which carries the full attribution and licence. OpenStreetMap screenshots are © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Timeline note: the time axis is deliberately non-linear. Deep time is compressed and the last two centuries are stretched, so that the modern episodes have room.