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Studio | Writing and Designing for Chatbots

How We Brought A Chatbot To LifeBest Practice Guide

by Alex Sher | AlexLSher , Isaac Lee | IsaacRLee , Patrick Hoy | , Mengyi Jenny Sun | MengyiJennySun

A chatbot creates a unique user experience with many benefits. It gives the audience an opportunity to ask questions and get to know more about your organization. It allows you to collect valuable information from the audience. It can increase interaction time on your site. Bot prototype In the spring of 2017, our Knight Lab team examined the conversational user interface of Public Good Software’s chatbot, which is a chat-widget embedded within media partner sites.......

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Studio | Storytelling Layers on 360 Video

How to Edit 360 Video in Adobe Premiere Pro CC

by Sherry Chiu |

Before you start editing your footage, make sure you have stitched your footage. You can read our guide to stitching here. After you have completed stitching your footage, you can now “edit” them in traditional video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Stitching is a common term that involves merging the separate camera inputs into single viewable format. On the other hand, editing is a broad umbrella term that we will use to refer......

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Studio | Storytelling Layers on 360 Video

Guide to shooting 360° video

by Umang Shukla | shuklol , Nikolas Wright | wrighteous

Before embarking on any 360° video project, we strongly encourage you to ask why. It is true that a spherical video can transport and immerse viewers in a way that is hard to replicate with traditional film, but which shouldn’t be used for the sake of creating 360° video. We encourage content creators to ask themselves the following questions before deciding to shoot in 360: Are we transporting the viewer to a place they cannot......

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Studio | Storytelling Layers on 360 Video

An introduction to 360° video

by Umang Shukla | shuklol

360° video is a fairly recent technology in which omnidirectional cameras are used to grab a spherical video capture of a space, rather than the rectangular capture in traditional videography. The perspectives of the omnidirectional cameras are then stitched together to generate an immersive experience for viewers to experience, placing the viewer within the context of a scene or event rather than presenting them as an outside observer, and giving the viewer the ability to......

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Studio | Environmental Reporting with Sensors

Democratizing data reporting from the ground upBuilding a dust sensor network

by Holly Kane | kaneholly , Victoria Cabales | , David Wallach | , Rachel Inderhees | rayrayr2d3

As the Trump administration continues to curtail funding for longstanding federal agencies like the EPA, citizens have taken it upon themselves to gather and contextualize the data formerly compiled by federal agencies. Scientists, academics and individuals have banded together to form save the data events to protect existing environmental data that has already been collected for fear it may be deleted or made inaccessible. This trend raises the question: Where will future data come from?......

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Studio | Photojournalism in 3D for VR and Beyond

A New Look-Around CosplayPhotogrammetry 3D models from the floor of Chicago’s C2E2 Comic Convention

by Henry Keyser | vrnalist , Theodore Chryssos | theo_at_medill , Jessica Buchleitner | 50womenproject

12-feet of dark feathers, a noir-detective’s trench coat, blue tie and black boots was a sight to see on a 5-foot stature. Truly appreciating her costume required seeing it from all angles—exactly the reason we went to make 3D models of cosplayers at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo. I really just wanted an excuse to make wings Morgan She spent a lot of late nights on this high school science fair project—but even when......

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Studio | Photojournalism in 3D for VR and Beyond

3D Modeling in the fieldCapturing People for Photogrammetry With a Smartphone

by Henry Keyser | vrnalist , Theodore Chryssos | theo_at_medill , Jessica Buchleitner | 50womenproject

Virtual reality has been called an internet-sized opportunity. But the Internet only attracted the billions of users it has today once every user was empowered to create, contribute and share content, whether they could code or not. Similarly, making something today for VR generally requires coding skills. However, there may be an easy solution from the surveying industry: Photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is any process that uses photos to make measurements. Initially, surveyors used it to create......

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Studio | Exploring Data Visualization in VR

Uncharted TerritoryDiving in to Data Visualization in Virtual Reality

by Miao Deng | , Gabriel Caniglia | , Megan Fu | meganmfu , Audrey Debruine

Virtual reality goes beyond the world of video games and 360 videos; it provides the opportunity to better communicate information to readers by having them experience data rather than just observe it. In instances where a bar chart just isn’t enough or when you find yourself making yet another line graph, this interactive website is here to guide you through the things to consider when creating data visualizations in virtual reality. It will tell you......

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Lab projects | Nov 21, 2016

A Google Spreadsheets change affecting TimelineJS users

by Joe Germuska

Google recently changed something about their Sheets service which is causing many people to run into an error when they are making a new timeline. Note: there should be no impact on existing timelines! After this change, many of you click on the "preview" and get this message: An unexpected error occurred trying to read your spreadsheet data [SyntaxError] Timeline configuration has no events. There is a straightforward work-around, but it requires those of you who have...

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Ideas | Sep 21, 2016

How Americans think and feel about gun violence

by Steve Tarzia

A man killed his wife, then himself. I want you to see his face and learn that he enjoyed fishing with his grandchildren. A small-time drug dealer is shot by two men in a parking lot. I find his Facebook profile and a photo shows him striking a playfully irreverent pose, giving the camera the middle finger. The photo’s comments take a mournful turn after a certain date. “Rest easy bro ???” Gun Memorial runs...

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Lab projects , Team news | Sep 15, 2016

Software developers interested in journalismNorthwestern and The Washington Post want you!

by Rich Gordon

Northwestern University and The Washington Post are offering a unique opportunity for two talented software developers interested in applying their programming skills in media and journalism. Here’s the proposition: (1) a full-tuition scholarship to earn a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University, followed by (2) a six-month paid internship with The Post’s world-class engineering team, with the possibility of subsequent full-time employment. These opportunities are made possible by the John S. and James L....

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Ideas | Jul 26, 2016

What happened when Gun Memorial let anyone contribute directly to victim profiles

by Steve Tarzia

If you’re reporting local or niche news, there’s a good chance that your audience collectively knows more about the story than you do. That’s especially true for us at Gun Memorial, a small publication with a nationwide mission of covering every American who is shot dead. In our latest, mostly successful, experiment, we let readers add to our stories without editor intervention. This article shares some lessons from that experience. Asking for reader contributions A...

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Ideas | Jul 25, 2016

How conversational interfaces make the internet more accessible for everyone

by Josh Shi

This story is part of a series on bringing the journalism we produce to as many people as possible, regardless of language, access to technology, or physical capability. Find the series introduction, as well as a list of published stories here. In 2004, human-computer interaction professor Alan Dix published the third edition of Human-Computer Interaction along with his colleagues, Janet Finley, Gregory Abowd, and Russell Beale. In a chapter called “The Interaction,” the authors wrote...

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Ideas | Jul 18, 2016

Three tools to help you make colorblind-friendly graphics

by Alex Duner

This story is part of a series on bringing the journalism we produce to as many people as possible, regardless of language, access to technology, or physical capability. Find the series introduction, as well as a list of published stories here. I am one of the 8% of men of Northern European descent who suffers from red-green colorblindness. Specifically, I have a mild case of protanopia (also called protanomaly), which means that my eyes lack...

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Ideas | Jul 11, 2016

Phone storiesHow a 100-year-old-technology helped Pop-up Magazine make news convenient for audiences

by Eunice Lee

This story is part of a series on bringing the journalism we produce to as many people as possible, regardless of language, access to technology, or physical capability. Find the series introduction, as well as a list of published stories here. As news organizations look increasingly to social networks, apps, and other recently-emerged technology to find new audiences, at least one has gone in the completely opposite direction. Pop-Up Magazine this year launched a product...

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