Zach Wise

Professor

Emmy winning interactive producer & Associate Professor @NorthwesternU, @KnightLab. Formerly of The New York Times. Creator of TimelineJS & StoryMapJS

Projects

Projects Zach Wise has worked on.

Digital Journalism, Bit by Bit.

Easy-to-make VR stories.

Democratizing Environmental Data

Tell the story behind the numbers.

Maps that tell stories.

Easy-to-make, beautiful timelines.

Studio Projects Zach Wise has worked on.

AI Art Generation for Journalism

Tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are shaking up the art world in large part because they are accessible for almost anyone to use. The limits of what they can create is still being tested. Many journalism articles lack visuals which are essential in today’s platform centric media landscape. A tool to automagically generate art for many of those articles could help smaller newsrooms without a budget for visuals (art/photography).

AI Editorial Model Training

Tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are shaking up the art world in large part because they are accessible for almost anyone to use. The limits of what they can create is still being tested. Many journalism articles lack visuals which are essential in today’s platform centric media landscape. We have several projects that utilize AI art for journalism but the trained model is problematic. This project builds on previous quarter’s work of training an...

AI Influencer driven TikTok Stories

This project will continue our work in using AI to create Tik Tok videos from articles. We have created AI personalities complete with voices that can take news articles and turn them into video scripts that fit their personalities. This project will build on the progress of previous teams in creating useful tools and methods for turning text articles into visual storytelling for social media including refining the output of TikTok videos and exploring other...

Resurrecting History for VR

Automated Photogrammetry. As AR and VR increasingly becomes the focus as we move away from smartphones, media organizations will have to find ways to produce content native to those mediums. These same organizations have a wealth of stories that continue to have value over time. Flat video and photo will become less desirable as we continue to move into these new spaces. Previous projects in the lab have surfaced an opportunity to take existing video...

Cape to Cairo

In 1953, Lydia Luhman Pederson, a resident of Caledonia, Illinois, traveled from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo. Along her transcontinental journey, Pederson shot movies, crafted a photo album scrapbook, and collected one-of-a-kind objects that are currently housed in the Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University. The Herskovits Library seeks to create a digital exhibition integrating emerging and engaging technologies to animate these objects and media.

Democratizing and Decentralizing News Media

Traditional, centralized news organizations are failing the emerging majority of Americans. The current average age of cable news viewers is 60 and the racial diversity of newsrooms has not budged since the 1970s. Yet most Americans are now under the age of 40 and members of either the Millennial or Z generations, the two most heterogeneous in American history. — Imara Jones What do Bitcoin, democracy and journalism have in common? Not much at the...

Crypto Media

For all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas. — Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee What do Bitcoin, security and journalism have in common? Not much at the moment, but as Web3 and smart contracts on blockchains are starting to take off and decentralize power in finance, their application in other industries and governments is getting a...

NFT FTW

You may have heard of NFTs. You may even know that NFT stands for Non-fungible token. Most of the hype around these digital assets is in the digital art market, but Time Magazine, The New York Times and others have sold NFTs of their articles and photographs. The New York Times Buy This Column in the Blockchain! originally sold for 350 Ether, which is around $1.5 Million dollars at the time this description is being...

Newsletters, Publishing and the Future of Web3

You may have heard of NFTs. You may even know that NFT stands for Non-fungible token. Most of the hype around these digital assets is in the digital art market, but Time Magazine, The New York Times and others have sold NFTs of their articles and photographs.

Data Streaming

Automated live streaming data dashboards and curated video mosaics of other live streams have become popular on platforms like Twitch. Stock checkers, inventory checkers and multi-streams of protests have all done well on Twitch. They inform their niche audience with real-time data and video in a way that other journalism organizations can’t. What other types of streaming data might meet the needs of an audience on Twitch? For this project, a team of students will...

Environmental Reporting with Sensors

Sensor journalism uses sensors to collect information about our environment. It opens new possibilities for journalists enabling them to collect and process data that might not be available or at a level of detail not previously available.

Augmented Reality Visualizations

An experimental design project that explores visualizing data in three dimensions for augmented reality. Visualizations that can be examined and inspected by physically getting closer or understood by walking around them, open up exciting possibilities for how we communicate complex ideas and data that reveals hidden truths.

Fact Flow

Editorial fact-checking is a mess at best and readers don’t see the benefits. Typically they doubt it happens or don’t appreciate the work it takes to make it happen. On the editing side, almost everyone who does it uses an antiquated process derived from print production habits even though most writers and editors are drafting in Google Docs. This can be better. Let’s make it better for both editorial and readers!

Storytelling with GIFs

This project will build upon prototypes and research conducted in the Fall 2019 Studio class, but participation is open to any interested student. As the open-web continues to die, storytellers need tools that help them create sharable artifacts suitable for a variety of social networks and platforms. Brevity and portability are of the utmost importance. This project is concerned with designing a tool that allows novice storytellers to create simple 5 frame (5 images) GIFS...

Information Spaces in AR/VR

An experimental design project that explores an emerging concept of information spaces. This concept is behind Microsoft’s pivot to create future Windows operating systems that exist in mixed reality headsets. Students will explore the concept of a news/information app that exists in AR and/or VR. For example, a political news feed might exist on a wall in your living room, and breaking news would appear on a coffee table, twitter reactions surround the coffee table...

Juxtapose

Juxtapose helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and GIFs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (growth of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.). This popular tool could be more useful to storytellers and web-makers if it had a couple of key features that have come up in...

Live Streaming the News

Platforms like Twitch are growing audience at break-neck speed thanks in part to covid lockdowns. But we haven’t seen as much interest among most news organizations. When we do see legacy news organizations streaming to places like Twitch or YouTube live, they simply stream their broadcast instead of creating native content that allows user engagement. The form tends to be much more casual and success tends to come from interacting with the audience to a...

Music Magazine

Music fans today have trouble finding the stories they want to read. Following all your favorite artists on social media is overwhelming, and searching Google turns up page after page of irrelevant junk. We’ll build a system that finds just what a fan wants to read.

Navigating Virtual Reality

Though many in journalism are excited about VR, few are addressing real issues with making it attractive and interactive for their audience. This story team will explore the idea of making multiple three-dimensional VR photos around a scene and linking them together so that the user can navigate it. They’ll be exploring complex VR design challenges, such as how to move around space without disorienting the user and how to easily author interactive environments.

New to Town

When people move to a new community, they have a million questions about their new home. Meanwhile, news organizations serving that community have an interest in “meeting” those new people and converting them into subscribers. The Indianpolis (“Indy”) Star, one of Medill’s Local News Initiative partners has identified this as an opportunity in their coverage area. This project provides the opportunity to work on a real challenge in media innovation and product development. Students will...

Oscillations

Advancements in neuroscience and immersive technologies offer mechanisms for engineering an entirely new mode of performance art one that engages audiences to unprecedented degree. Using the latest VR production techniques, students used motion capture and machine learning to teach a computer to improvise a performance, creating an engaging VR experience.

Photojournalism in 3D for VR and Beyond

In this project, students will use modern approaches to making 3D images both with hardware and software processing.

Podcast Discoverability

The podcasting landscape is overcrowded, with larger voices from legacy broadcast media sometimes drowning out new entrants. Browsing for new-to-you, quality podcasts is hard, with shows scattered across distribution platforms. This team will explore how we might provide users a better path to discovering new podcasts.

Privacy Mirror

The average person today that has a smartphone, walks around leaking information about themselves over radio signals. WiFi, bluetooth and NFC radiate personal information into the public airwaves. These signals can tell you a lot about a person without their knowledge. To raise awareness around privacy and security for digital devices, this project will seek to create a “mirror” that reflects back information that is radiating out from anyone who stands in front of it....

Projection Mapping

Imagine that any wall, building floor or doorway could come alive and tell stories. Using projection mapping, many artists, advertisers and industries are already doing it. In this project, students will explore ways in which projection mapping is currently being used and adapt them for journalistic purposes. Students will build and prototype their adaptations.

Smarter News

How might we better understand how to reach our audience, delivering the right news at the right moment, or for the right mood, or for the right amount of time?

Storyline: Charts that tell stories.

One of the most common problems we see in data storytelling is how and when to introduce an editorial layer onto a visualization. Mobile devices afford us very little real estate to work with, and interactivity must be limited. But without a “story” layer, users are left without the context to understand what events might impact or inform a trend. They see something going up or down but don’t see why. “Storyline” will be a...

Storytelling Layers on 360 Video

In this project, students will film 360 video and explore the best ways to add on that additional layer; students will finish the quarter with two videos, and will document their findings to make their storytelling methods more accessible to others.

Design Research in Youth Media

As local news sources dwindle there is one group of reporters in every community that continue to keep journalism alive: high school students. High School news and newspapers are the only source of news in many news deserts. They are also important for education in media literacy and the first exposure many people have to what journalism is. Many high school publications rely on free repurposed systems and content management systems to publish their work....

Articles

Articles by Zach Wise

  • Lab projects |

    Spring 2015 Collaborative Innovation class presentations

    by Zach Wise | zlwise

    Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 3, journalism and computer science students in the latest version of Northwestern’s “Collaborative Innovation in Journalism and Technology” class will unveil the prototypes they’ve built over the past 10 weeks. You’re invited to see what they’ve come up with. The projects they will be presenting are: Composite: A provocative project that shows the faces of individuals around a location based on publicly available photos. ImageTweet: A tool that makes tweeting pictures with...

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Posts tagged with Zach Wise

  • Lab projects |

    StoryMapJS Beta gets a fresh look, MapBox maps, and a new gigapixel image tool

    by Ryan Graff

    Back in December we released an alpha version of StoryMapJS, our tool to help journalists tell better stories with maps. Since then it’s been adopted by a number of journalists and deployed around the world — helping to tell the stories about boarding school runaways in England and chart the impact of the debt ceiling debate in the U.S. among many others. We have been refining StoryMapJS and rolled out a few bug fixes already,...

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  • Ideas |

    Brainstorming ideas for social network analysis in investigations and journalism

    by Nicole Zhu

    Some of the "How might we…" questions at the NICAR14 designing new tools for social network analysis journalism session in Baltimore Sunday morning. This year's CAR conference has had many discussions about organizing data and surfacing stories, whether it’s through crowdsourcing personal stories in Al Jazeera’s “Uganda Speaks” project or by analyzing 80,000 censored Weibo posts in ProPublica’s “China’s Memory Hole.” Social network analysis, which is the analysis of the connections linking people, businesses and...

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  • Team news , NICAR |

    Knight Lab team at NICAR 2014

    by Ryan Graff

    Hello, NICAR 2014. It’s lovely to see you all again. Knight Lab’s brought a small(large) crew to Baltimore for this year's annual conference. Some of us are old friends and some of us are just dying to get to know you. So, please, don't be shy. Reach out and say hello! Student fellows: Alex Duner (freshman, developer, journalism) Tyler Fisher (senior, developer, journalism) — Find Tyler at the student brown bag lunch and from 3-4...

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  • Lab projects |

    Introducing the StoryMapJS Alpha, now with an authoring tool

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    Where? is one of the fundamental questions journalists set out to answer, but often, the maps produced to accompany stories feel flat, or are hard to interpret. StoryMapJS is a new Knight Lab tool to help you connect the places of your story into a media-rich narrative. Like its sibling, TimelineJS, StoryMap makes it really easy to illustrate your work with photos, videos, sound, tweets and more. And today it's easier still: a couple of months...

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  • Lab projects , Team news |

    TimelineJS passes 31 million pageviews, 250k deployments

    by Ryan Graff

    When we pushed the final design and functionality of TimelineJS out to the world about 18 months ago, it was already a success for Knight Lab. It had been deployed at LeMonde, RadioLab, Gigaom and other big-name publishers. But in the year and half since, TimelineJS become a staple of the the web making world. In fact, early this month the 250,000th instance of TimelineJS was created and deployed. At around the same time reader...

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  • mozfest , Team news |

    Knight Lab's MozFest 2013 wrap up and link-o-rama

    by Miranda Mulligan

    This post has been updated with additional links to MozFest 2013 content. Kicking off the festival, Friday night begins with a Science Fair at Ravensbourne College. Just like last year, the Knight Lab team took a jump across the pond a couple weeks ago to attend the Mozilla Festival (October 25-27) in London. Still running on fumes from the remaining high felt from our attendance in 2012, the eleven of us were really excited to be there. This incredible...

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  • Lab projects |

    TimelineJS — Now with even more Knight Lab

    by Joe Germuska | joegermuska

    From the beginning, TimelineJS has been a project of Northwestern University Knight Lab. However, when Zach Wise first set out to create it, the Knight Lab had a less developed software process and identity, so Zach presented Timeline as a product of his personal Verite.co website. Since then, two things have happened: TimelineJS has become wildly popular, and the Knight Lab has established cohesive design guidelines and a more methodical software development process. In the...

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  • Team news , Ideas |

    How our university lab is helping prepare future hacker-journalists

    by Rich Gordon

    Medill “unicorns” at graduation (left to right): Assistant Prof. Jeremy Gilbert;Hilary Fung; Dan Hill; Sarah Adler; Katie Zhu, Prof. Rich Gordon The Knight Lab produces software -- but not just software. We also help produce a new generation of journalists who can thrive at the intersection of journalism and technology. The lab is contributing to Northwestern's educational mission, while also giving students a platform to prepare themselves to have an impact after they leave. Cases...

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  • mozfest , Team news , Events |

    Knight Lab's MozFest 2012 wrap up

    by Miranda Mulligan

    Last week, a significant portion of the Knight Lab team was fortunate enough to join the Mozilla Festival in London, November 9-12. This incredible event, hosted by the Mozilla Foundation, is in its third year and intends to motivate an entire generation of web makers. As far as we can tell, they are doing this job well. In fact, during the Sunday morning keynote, Mozilla's executive director, Mark Surman shared an anecdote that an attendee had likened #MozFest to #SXSWi in its early...

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  • Lab projects |

    TimlineJS deployed more than 1,500 times, new features

    by Ryan Graff

    In March the Knight Lab released TimelineJS. By June, journalists around the world had picked it up and used it to tell some of the biggest stories in the country. All told, more than 1,500 sites have used the technology. With all that adoption TimelineJS’s developer, Zach Wise, has added new features, resources, and even a new license that hopefully makes TimelineJS available to even more people. First, a quick overview new features: Languages — TimelineJS...

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  • Lab projects |

    TimelineJS picked up by storytellers worldwide, some examples

    by Ryan Graff

    Back in March the Knight Lab partnered with Medill Associate Professor Zach Wise (a former staffer at The New York Times and part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team at the Las Vegas Sun) to launch a product that was then known as Timeline. In the 2.5 months since the launch, Timeline has grown and adapted to user needs and the marketplace. For starters, the name changed from Timeline to Timeline JS – a move that...

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  • Lab projects |

    Journalists begin adopting TimelineJS

    by Ryan Graff

    About three weeks ago the Knight Lab introduced Timeline – a tool that enables journalists to quickly and easily create good-looking, interactive timelines. Word of Timeline slipped out a few days before we formally announced the product on Twitter on March 21 and followed up with a press release on March 23. A week later Twitter feedback made it clear that Timeline’s developer and Medill faculty member Zach Wise had created something particularly useful. Links...

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  • Lab projects |

    New tool: An easy way to build attractive timelines

    by Mike Silver

    Timelines are a great tool for drawing readers into stories and the Knight Lab is pleased to introduce a great tool for creating them. Our timeline builder was created by Zach Wise, who last year joined the Medill faculty from the New York Times.   In teaching students to deploy timelines, Wise found there wasn’t a satisfactory tool that met current needs.  Working with the Knight Lab, he created one of his own and it’s now...

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