With the advent of AI-enabled “vibe coding”, I have been like the proverbial kid in a candy store. So many systems I have wanted to build over the years, are now possible at a fraction of the cost and effort!

One of these is a product called Express. Building on Local Ground, our earlier open-source mapping platform, I wanted to build a dead simple mapping tool that allowed people to tell their own place-based stories using maps. There are alternatives, but they are clunky, expensive, or focused on data collection more than storytelling.

Express is part storytelling platform, crowd-sourcing tool and qualitatively-minded GIS. It allows for the geo-referencing of all kinds of media, displaying it through maps and slideshows, and inviting people to participate by submitting their own media and stories. It’s open source and free to use.

I’ve been using this tool in my classes and research in a number of ways:

• Oral history - students in a 7th-grade social class shared stories of the “meaning of home”, by interviewing their parents about where they came from
• Photovoice - tudents in my Remaking the City workshop use Express to share their experiences as new residents of New York
• Participatory mapping - students in a summer program in Oakland documented healthy food options (or the lack thereof) in their communities
• Storytelling - we created an interactive, multimedia cultural atlas for sharing stories — myths, poems, songs, and folk tales — from across India

Over the coming weeks I’ll share more about these experiences, and the features in Express that made them possible.