Untangled: New Lab project aims to improve browser-based knowledge management for journalists

When we canvassed the community at News Foo late last fall, many people described tools they'd like to see which help journalists manage and make sense of data. These suggestions encouraged us to make a specific 2013 initiative we're calling "Reporters' Notebook," in which we'll look at existing tools and imagine new ones.

As one step in brainstorming possibilities, we returned to a student project called Untangld. This project came out of our collaborative innovation classes, where journalism and computer science students have a single academic quarter to build a prototype of an interesting tool. In this case, the project was intended to "help investigative journalists easily record and correlate information they find in online data repositories." Several people were impressed by the demo, but the project hasn't been revisited since the class ended.

Whiteboard sketch, Untangled

Seeing potential in the basic idea, we are revisiting Untangld and working on a more comprehensive implementation. Beyond restoring the lost 'e' to the project's name, we are envisioning a more complete system for browser-based knowledge management.

Here are a few pieces of the new scope:

  • Implement a more robust datastore. Based on how reporters have told us they work, we think that a graph database is a promising way to store the information.
  • Simplify the capture process. Rather than having to select text for each important player on a web page, we're exploring entity extraction techniques which can reduce the number of steps required to store the important facts.


We're aiming to have a prototype which shows some of these ideas sometime this summer. We look forward to sharing it with you and getting more feedback on where this idea could go. If you have some thoughts / ideas to share, please leave a comment below or shoot us an email: knightlab@northwestern.edu.

About the author

Joe Germuska

Chief Nerd

Joey runs Knight Lab’s technology, professional staff and student fellows. Before joining us, Joe was on the Chicago Tribune News Apps team. He's the project lead for CensusReporter.org and a board member of City Bureau.

Latest Posts

  • A Big Change That Will Probably Affect Your Storymaps

    A big change is coming to StoryMapJS, and it will affect many, if not most existing storymaps. When making a storymap, one way to set a style and tone for your project is to set the "map type," also known as the "basemap." When we launched StoryMapJS, it included options for a few basemaps created by Stamen Design. These included the "watercolor" style, as well as the default style for new storymaps, "Toner Lite." Stamen...

    Continue Reading

  • Introducing AmyJo Brown, Knight Lab Professional Fellow

    AmyJo Brown, a veteran journalist passionate about supporting and reshaping local political journalism and who it engages, has joined the Knight Lab as a 2022-2023 professional fellow. Her focus is on building The Public Ledger, a data tool structured from local campaign finance data that is designed to track connections and make local political relationships – and their influence – more visible. “Campaign finance data has more stories to tell – if we follow the...

    Continue Reading

  • Interactive Entertainment: How UX Design Shapes Streaming Platforms

    As streaming develops into the latest age of entertainment, how are interfaces and layouts being designed to prioritize user experience and accessibility? The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated streaming services becoming the dominant form of entertainment. There are a handful of new platforms, each with thousands of hours of content, but not much change or differentiation in the user journeys. For the most part, everywhere from Netflix to illegal streaming platforms use similar video streaming UX standards, and...

    Continue Reading

  • Innovation with collaborationExperimenting with AI and investigative journalism in the Americas.

    Lee este artículo en español. How might we use AI technologies to innovate newsgathering and investigative reporting techniques? This was the question we posed to a group of seven newsrooms in Latin America and the US as part of the Americas Cohort during the 2021 JournalismAI Collab Challenges. The Collab is an initiative that brings together media organizations to experiment with AI technologies and journalism. This year,  JournalismAI, a project of Polis, the journalism think-tank at...

    Continue Reading

  • Innovación con colaboraciónCuando el periodismo de investigación experimenta con inteligencia artificial.

    Read this article in English. ¿Cómo podemos usar la inteligencia artificial para innovar las técnicas de reporteo y de periodismo de investigación? Esta es la pregunta que convocó a un grupo de siete organizaciones periodísticas en América Latina y Estados Unidos, el grupo de las Américas del 2021 JournalismAI Collab Challenges. Esta iniciativa de colaboración reúne a medios para experimentar con inteligencia artificial y periodismo. Este año, JournalismAI, un proyecto de Polis, la think-tank de periodismo...

    Continue Reading

  • AI, Automation, and Newsrooms: Finding Fitting Tools for Your Organization

    If you’d like to use technology to make your newsroom more efficient, you’ve come to the right place. Tools exist that can help you find news, manage your work in progress, and distribute your content more effectively than ever before, and we’re here to help you find the ones that are right for you. As part of the Knight Foundation’s AI for Local News program, we worked with the Associated Press to interview dozens of......

    Continue Reading

Storytelling Tools

We build easy-to-use tools that can help you tell better stories.

View More