Kevin and I have been working on FOLD, a tool that adds structure and context to news stories.

FOLD allows you to expand and contract elements of a story (to get more or less detail), and associates a context bar to each section of the story. A context bar can include many elements, including historical background, maps, photographs, citizen media, videos, or technical descriptions.

From observing people consume news, we recognize that readers spend significant time acquiring contextual information in additional browser tabs, taking their attention away from the story at hand. FOLD offers journalists a way to provide readers with a curated “tangent.”

For the final project, Kevin and I would like to continue our work on FOLD by:

1) Conducting further observations of readers interacting with complex and/or emerging stories so we can see their processes of trying to understand the news (e.g. Do they pull up other sources to look up a specific concept or prior event? If so, how often? Do they give up reading the article altogether? What is their understanding of the article after having read it?)

2) Making changes and improvements to the design based on our observations of readers and feedback from the class

3) Adding an authoring platform (so writers can easily turn plain text and photos/videos into FOLD vertical and horizontal ribbons)

4) Conducting user studies with a few journalists in the class, to see if and how their writing process changes when structuring stories in the FOLD way. Extending from that, we can also see if FOLD changes not only how something is written, but what is written.

5) Re-making an existing story into a FOLD story to create a nice demo of what the tool can do