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Last year, we released the initial version of SoundCite, a tool that helps content creators add inline audio clips to their stories. It was designed to be easy to use for any author (no coding required). We open sourced the project and hoped that our users would guide us on future development. They have. Recently The New York Times and Al Jazeera published stories using customized versions of SoundCite that included the ability to do...
Events |
This month saw the debut of the first ever Journalism School Hackathon, hosted by the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication. It was an exciting opportunity for forward-thinking and tech-savvy students from across the country to come together and use their combined powers to work on challenges a few local news outlets had developed. The participants were tasked with maintaining a focus on creating products that would be feasible, desirable and, perhaps most importantly,...
Ideas |
This is the third post in a series highlighting research and possible new directions for our Twitter search tool, twXplorer. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are bursting with information thanks to people and organizations the world over ready and willing to share. For journalists these platforms can make for invaluable resources – that is if they know how to use them. In my work researching possible future directions for twXplorer I came across...
Ideas |
After Shelly wrote this post, Webucator, a company that provides Python training, volunteered to create solutions for these projects. They've made a series of videos that'll help you out if you need it. Learning a new programming language is both the most exciting and the most humbling experience. For me, that language has recently been Python, which I’ve been learning over these last few months. And as every coder knows, the best way to learn...
This is the second post in a series highlighting research and possible new directions for our Twitter search tool, twXplorer. I was in India working for CNN-IBN on their Citizen Journalist website searching for some meaningful way — any meaningful way — to share Twitter trends generated by the voices of everyday citizens when I first came across twXplorer. I was so excited! Wow, I thought, I must be able to share these histograms with my...
Nine new projects from teams of Northwestern journalism and computer science students demonstrate ways that technology could help journalists, publishers and media consumers. And you can see them unveiled next week. The final presentations in our unusual "Collaborative Innovation in Journalism and Technology" class take place at 6:30 p.m. (Chicago time), Wednesday, June 4 in the McCormick Tribune Center Forum. If you can attend, please let us know. If you can't, catch the live stream...
Ideas |
Rebecca Lai watches me type every letter of a long file name — something like pythonreallylongfilename1234567.py — into Sublime. After the first couple letters, she cannot contain herself. “TAB COMPLETE! TAB COMPLETE!” If there's an apt analogy for the way Lai must feel when I forget to tab complete (keep reading if you're unfamiliar with the term) as she helps debug my code, it must be something like this: you're watching over your mother’s shoulder...
As part of his academic research, graduate student fellow Neil Holt is examining ways in which Knight Lab’s twXplorer might be updated to be more useful to working journalists. This is the first post in a series. Knight Lab is looking to bring its well-reviewed Twitter search tool, twXplorer to the next level over the next three months and we’re hoping you’ll help shape its future by telling us where you’d like to see it go....
Ideas |
[caption id="attachment_5488" align="alignnone" width="850"] The author's project from HackIllinois.[/caption] Last weekend I participated in HackIllinois, a 36-hour hackathon hosted at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There wasn’t a set theme other than to create something awesome, which left participants open to hack on whatever they wanted — web apps, mobile apps, hardware hacks, and anything else you can imagine. While all this creative freedom sounded great at first, my teammates and I — all first-time...
Ideas , Profiles , Apps & projects |
The New York Times’ graphics team began working on the many explanatory, video-based interactives and composite images for the Winter Olympics many months in advance. When the Olympics roll around every two years, virtually every news site covers it in one way or another. For interactive teams in particular, the Olympic spectacle provides a wealth of opportunity to craft stories that are beautiful, functional and informational. For Sochi many newsrooms put together great packages (some...
Team news , Profiles , People , Apps & projects |
Dhrumil Mehta On Friday, FiveThirtyEight announced that Dhrumil Mehta (a former Knight Lab student fellow) would be joining their team as a database journalist. It was fun news for us to hear, particularly when you consider that a year and half ago journalism wasn’t even a small part Mehta’s career plan. At the time, Mehta was a senior here at Northwestern and six months from completing a bachelor’s degree in philosophy (with a cognitive science...
Last week we put the final touches on a StoryMapJS update. As we were wrapping things up, we started to look for fun way to show off the new GigaPixel tool, which allows you to use the StoryMap interface to explain what’s happening in a static image. Eventually we decided to follow the Game of Thrones character Arya through the show’s imagined world of Westeros. The Lab’s operations and project manager (and resident Game of...
Ideas |
Editorially, one of the first and prominent of the collaborative "pre-CMS" tools, recently announced that it will shut down May 30 despite much fanfare from users. I once worked at a content creation agency in Boston where we churned out an exorbitant volume of content for client companies’ websites on a daily basis. Each writer was responsible for 15-20 stories per day that ranged from 200 to 500 words. We peer-edited and posted all of...
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,...
As we traveled to various conferences and events last year, we met a number of fascinating nerds doing digital journalism work in Latin America, Europe and Africa. We learned a lot from talking and hacking with them, but just as we were getting going, the event would end. We wanted more time to talk to these journalists, and even work with them, and we wanted to connect them to our wider community back home. Manuel...