Resources and Tools

Looking for something even more exhaustive? Check out the Networked Storytelling Group’s Google Spreadsheet from our friends at Berkman.

Presentation and Storytelling Tools

FOLDan open publishing platform with a unique structure that allows writers to add multimedia “context cards” to narrative text. Writers can search for and add “context cards” to their stories directly within the platform. Readers click highlighted words inside of a narrative card to see the context. Context cards can contain everything from videosmapstweetsmusic, to free text and more. 

DeepStreammakes live streams easier to find and lets people add interesting content to them. Users can search across multiple streaming websites, gather groups of related live streams together, and add blog posts, news stories, images, tweets, and other media. DeepStream is in beta and under active development.

Canva: Graphic design tool that uses a drag and drop UI to allow you to create anything from blog graphics to posters. The essence of it is that you choose a theme, add elements to that theme (like a grid structure, lines, icons and charts) to create an infographic.

Meograph: Web-based multimedia presentation tool with audio clips and maps. Leslie used this in her story about street musicians in Boston.

Scratch: Visual programming tool and community designed to teach programming thinking. Ravi used this as an interactive slideshow to present his Media Diary.

Zeega: A multimedia storytelling platform for integrating web-based sound, video, and anigifs in a slideshow format. Used by Christian in his fact-checking assignment about Romanian women.

Storify: An easy way to quote social media and embed it in other stories. Used by Stephen in his story on the SF Mission Bay fire, Ali in his story on peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban, and many others.

Embeddable Context Cards by Vox

Storymaker: a journalism app that takes one through some very simple steps of filing a video, audio or photo story, giving useful prompts of what exactly to capture at various points. It then compiles the video, audio or photo story for easy publishing to your favorite platform. Right now, the app is only available for Android, but iOS version is on its way.

Image Tools

EasyMoza: A free photo mosaic tool that Julia used to make a profile of Elissar.

ThingLink: Tell an interactive story by placing links on a single photo. As Christian did in his piece on a tennis match.

TinEye: A reverse image search that is helpful for verifying images. Give it an image and it will show you where it has appeared previously. Google also has a reverse image search.

Annotation Tools

Genius: An online annotation platform aimed to treat rap lyrics as poetry and annotate them. Can be used for annotating other texts as well as in the example by Aviva.

Bounce: Another online annotation platform where you can annotate web pages. Used by Ali for fact-checking an article on neuroscience.

Annotation Studio: Developed at the HyperStudio Lab here at MIT. Modern and usable annotation system.

Research & Data Collection Tools

Facebook Graph Search: Facebook’s social search service. Look up people and places using plain language, e.g. “Restaurants my friends like in Kendall Square”. William used this in his profile video of Dalia to access photos that Dalia liked on Facebook.

SimplyMeasured: Collect analytics about people’s twitter accounts. Used by Caty to analyze Jeff’s twitter account.

Storyful: A service to verify social media.

IFTTT: A tool to capture data feeds from the Internet and make them so stuff for you. Used by Alezsu in his craft beer project to track mentions of the beer on Instagram and dump them into a spreadsheet

twxplorer: A tool to explore twitter data along the lines of particular hashtags. You can see who are the top tweeters on a particular hashtag, analytics around hashtags, etc.

Google Fusion Tables: Tool to combine multiple data sets and publish them in various ways. Used by Hiromi in her analysis of Sumo Wrestling history.

Easy Application Frameworks

Meteor: An open-source java application framework that makes spinning up a quick application fairly simple. Does require some coding skills. Kevin used this for his annotated profile of Uri.

Design Tools

Sketch: (alternative to Adobe Illustrator, also allows you to create interactive prototypes. $99, but cheaper with a student discount)

Balsamiq: (another prototyping tool, draws interface elements in a “sketchy” style, which can be really useful for getting honest early-stage feedback)

Other

Postie: Post to WordPress by sending an email (not currently installed on PartNews, but could be helpful on your own blog)