Category: Tech Camp

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Two tools for interactive timelines

There are lots of tools out there for building interactive timelines, but my two favorites are Dipity and TimelineJS.

Dipity has been around long enough that it was the platform for one of my first digital storytelling projects, which documented New Hampshire residents who died while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

TimelineJS is newer, and I’ve quickly grown to love it because of its polished look. It’s been used for several notable stories, including this money laundering project by the San Antonio Express-News and the Denver Post’s coverage of the Colorado movie theater shooting.

The two platforms work a little differently. Dipity is a WYSIWYG  (short for “what you see is what you get.”) Users insert links, images, text and video directly into the timeline. This video gives you a quick overview:

TimelineJS, meanwhile, is based on a Google Sheets template that allows users to drop in text, photos, videos, maps and more. Click here for the template and step-by-step instructions.

(Both Dipity and TimelineJS are also popular among educators. Here’s a piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education about TimelineJS. And here’s another about Dipity.)

UPDATE, June 18: Here’s another example of Timeline JS from CT News Junkie. Note how the editors designed a still image with a click button to work with the site’s narrow center column.

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What can Zeega do for journalism?

Digital narrative is being redefined with projects like Snowfall,  Firestorm and, this week, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Bounced Around.

These stunning, intricate works are landmarks on the path to tomorrow’s journalism, but they also require more resources than most newsrooms can muster. That’s why tools like Zeega are so exciting. By meshing the curation power of Storify with the layout and design features of PhotoShop, Zeega allows users to piece together elegant, interactive narratives like these. Or join the Internet’s perpetual genuflection to cats.

Regardless of your end goal, Zeega is free and fairly straightforward to use. I’m especially fond of how it generates automatic citations for curated content, creating a trail of verification for viewers. Also nice: Zeega uses HTML5, not Flash, so it’s compatible with virtually every device.

If you’d like to give Zeega a try, follow these steps:

  • Click here to go to the Zeega homepage and create an account.
  • Click the blue “create new Zeega” button in the upper right corner of the homepage. You’ll see a user interface that looks something like this:

zeega

  • The column on the left is your pallet. Use it to find publicly-available sounds, images and videos. You can also upload your own.
  • Drag and drop those elements on to the black canvas in the center of the page. Elements can be combined using layers similar to those in PhotoShop.
  • To add a new slide in your Zeega, use the “add page” button in the upper left. To add text or change the background color, use the buttons to the right.
  • If you’d like an audio file to play during the Zeega, add one using the “soundtrack” button in the upper right.
  • When you’re done, publish and share your Zeega using the buttons in the upper right.

Want to learn more? Poynter’s NewsU recently hosted a Zeega webinar. You can watch a replay here.

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(Google) Fusion cuisine

If you’re coming to today’s Tech Camp — and you should — here are few links that we’ll reference during our second Google Fusion workshop:

1.) A list of U.S. state foods from Wikipedia. (I’ll show you how to import this into Fusion during the workshop.)

2.) A file containing information on the boundaries of the U.S. states. (I found this through Google’s Tabels search interface, which you can see here.)

3.) Obesity rates by state.

4.) A list of state capitals.

Our goal will be to create the following: A map that uses different shades of a color to show obesity rates and illustrates official state foods; a timeline that shows when each official food was adopted; a chart or other type of visualization that tells us something else about this information.

If you missed last week’s overview of Fusion, here’s everything you need to know.