Introduction to open-source GIS tools for journalists: GIS software is expensive, right? Wait, there are open source GIS tools now? And Matt Wynn wrote up a few for Poynter? Let me mash my mouse on that link…
Tag: maps
A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map
A Powerful Tool for Local Journalism: Contextualized News on a Map: Alexis Madrigal, like many who have commented so far, are impressed with Tackable’s tablet news map app. Me, too.
On the road with Kerouapp
Moderately fascinated by word of Kerouapp, which seems like it places your tweets on a map with a handsome timeline.
Here it is in action at the Guardian UK: Krakow Twitrip
Making interactive maps less interactive
Making interactive maps less interactive: Making maps, part 1: Less interactivity. Brian Boyer of the Chicago Tribune on a mission to teach you how to make interactive maps that don’t suck. Step 1 is indeed to make them less interactive. I buy it.
There’s a full tutorial spread out in a few posts. Follow along, kids.
Ushahidi’s Crowdmap adds checkins, just in case you need a white-label app to gather and map breaking news reports. (Hint: You probably do.)
Ushahidi’s Crowdmap adds checkins, just in case you need a white-label app to gather and map breaking news reports. (Hint: You probably do.)
Looser than average ends
Let’s just dig into the bucket of links I’ve been mailing myself from Tweetie, er, Twitter for the iPhone, and see what we can tie together here…
- There is now a “Share on Twitter” bookmarklet for your Web browser that pairs rather nicely with the recently released “Tweet” button for your website. (An aside: There should be no such thing as a “retweet” button for your website. If the user is mashing the button to craft their own tweet about it, it’s not much of a retweet, is it? The old Tweetmeme method of making the user retweeting @tweetmeme seemed backwards to me, although I can certainly understand their motivation.)
- Seth Lewis recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation on the Knight News Challenge. Judging by the abstract, it looks like an interesting academic take on how the News Challenge program has expanded the boundaries of “journalism” and the limits on who might be a participant in that sort of activity. (Obvious disclosure: Hey, I won a KNC grant a couple years back, so I’m extra-interested.)
- Speaking of research, if you’ve written anything academic about online journalism in the last five years or so, you probably cited Pablo Boczkowski’s work. Lucky for you, he has a new book out, called News at Work. Read it, cite it, rock it.
- This fascinates me: TimeFlow, a visual reporting/analysis tool for reporters. Less about visualizing conventional “data,” more about visualizing what you know about a story. Better than a pile of notepads? Surely. (via Mark Schaver)
- USA Today’s Josh Hatch talks about that great Hurricane Katrina project they launched for the fifth anniversary of the storm, released on the Web, but designed for the iPad. I complained pretty adamantly about a recent Washington Post package that was clearly designed for the iPad, to the detriment of readability on the Web. The USA Today package, on the other hand, is the heir to the “Flash package of videos-as-chapters story” multimedia presentation. There’s no Flash, of course, in either the video players, or cool-trick-of-the-moment “Then and Now” image gallery. The USA Today package wisely doesn’t attempt to squeeze a massive text story into a mobile-friendly format. I’d like to believe that this is the beginning of a trend: The cool interactive built with just enough attention to the mobile browser. The user experience carries over across platforms without any missing pieces.
- And, filed under a mix of fun, music, and historical information visualized as a map, the Rap Map, which maps and explains locations mentioned in the lyrics of popular hip-hop compositions. Spotted this via Kottke, who highlights the Club New York entry, which includes the Shyne/Puffy/J-Lo incident that inadvertently led to me quitting the movie/tv/commercial business. Long story.
So what’s the common thread?
When I look at these links, what jumps out at me are the layers of systemization and optimization that we layer on top of the Web of information available to us as journalists (and to consumers of news.)
Make sense of your social media workflow, impose order on your notes on a story, gather, catalog, and cross-reference otherwise independent locations…
Maybe this is one of the important parts about the shift from existing as a newspaper to a news organization: The end product is no longer, naturally, ink-on-paper. The end product is the organization of information into something useful to the audience.
But that’s obvious, right?
(A few other sources of origin, from my point of view, for the above information presented as a bulleted list: @amandabee, @chanders, @niemanlab)
8-Bit NYC
A map of New York City, Legend of Zelda style. I’ll go on the record as wildly preferring this method to the “web visualized as subway map” approach that’s been so persistent in recent years. I will also approve of Super Mario Bros. 3 mappages.
