Social reformer Booth ( 1893) visualised the findings from his painstaking inquiry of urban poverty in late Victorian London in a series of street maps colour coded by the social status of the residents, known as the Booth Poverty Maps (see ). That being said, social and cultural mapping is not new and there is a long history of using maps to investigate social issues centuries ago, for example, the topics on health, poverty and identity (Vaughan 2018). For example, the frequently updated COVID case map of the USA showing publicly debating topics such as the latest hot spots of infections and vaccination rates, produced by the New York Times magazine ( ). Story-based mapping is a very intuitive and informative way of visual presentation in data journalism’s storytelling toolsets as well. Amongst the narrative cartography community, the use of map-based storytelling along with geo-awareness and spatial literacy have also been promoted in the context of citizen science (Kerski 2015). New forms of spatial expressions about places and stories associated with places are also witnessed in the literature of film studies, visual arts and digital humanities (Caquard 2011). Maps have long been employed as natural languages of spatial storytelling by geographers and other scientists (See, for example, Kraak and Kveladze 2017 Kwan 2008 Mocnik and Fairbairn 2018 Segel and Heer 2010 Wood 1987). The relationship between maps and storytelling can be viewed from a cartographic perspective that maps are used to display the spatial structure of the latter and maps have the narrative power (Caquard and Cartwright 2014). Maps are abstract and simplified models of different facets of the real world. The stories, narratives, and patterns of social and cultural phenomena along spatial dimensions are more pronounced when they are geo-visualised using maps and cartographic design as a way of visual storytelling (Roth 2021). 2008 O'Brien and Cheshire 2016 van Dijk and Longley 2020). However, the spatial logic of social and cultural landscapes is sometimes not explicit until they are superimposed on various maps showing the spatial context of the events, using a variety of cartographic representations and techniques such as dot maps, contour maps, flow maps, choropleth maps and mashups (e.g., Gibin et al. 2002) spotted in many multicultural cities due to the uneven geographic distributions of ethnic communities across different urban settings (Lan et al. Many social and cultural phenomena are often developed within certain geographic contexts or neighbourhoods, which exhibit very clear spatial patterns, for instance, ethnic ghettos or enclaves (Johnston et al.
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