Students are working closely with the team at Hearken, and are gaining valuable insights into how important audience engagement is to our media landscape.
Emily Withrow
Assistant Professor
Story mechanic - maintaining the engines of great storytelling across platforms. Current research focus - voice user interfaces. Past life - @TheAVClub, @McKinsey.
Projects
Projects Emily Withrow has worked on.
Interactive Audio
This team will design an interactive audio/radio story, almost like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure meets Serial. We’ll be creating it for the Amazon Echo, a bluetooth speaker outfitted with microphones so that you can talk to it. What makes this device different is that it has no screen; you command it with your voice. This kind of interaction is relatively new territory; how people talk to it, and how to talk back, will be fertile ground for this project.
Podcast Discoverability
The podcasting landscape is overcrowded, with larger voices from legacy broadcast media sometimes drowning out new entrants. Browsing for new-to-you, quality podcasts is hard, with shows scattered across distribution platforms. This team will explore how we might provide users a better path to discovering new podcasts.
ProPublica Illinois
Students will design, develop, prototype and test one tool for community engagement, with a likely focus on the listening and information gathering stage.
Storyline: Charts that tell stories.
One of the most common problems we see in data storytelling is how and when to introduce an editorial layer onto a visualization. Mobile devices afford us very little real estate to work with, and interactivity must be limited. But without a “story” layer, users are left without the context to understand what events might impact or inform a trend. They see something going up or down but don’t see why. “Storyline” will be a tool for creating stories around line graphs.