Students are working closely with the team at Hearken, and are gaining valuable insights into how important audience engagement is to our media landscape.

Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Cortana—smart speakers and agents are now used by about 20% of US homes. People use them to ask about weather, set timers, play games, get information, or listen to the news. But are these devices delivering high-quality news and information or could they be misinforming and sharing “junk” news? This project aims to find out. By developing an audit method that defines what queries to audit and systematically collects data on the results over time for those queries from several different smart speakers, the project will allow for an assessment and comparison of news quality from these different devices.

In 1953, Lydia Luhman Pederson, a resident of Caledonia, Illinois, traveled from Cape Town, South Africa to Cairo.

Along her transcontinental journey, Pederson shot movies, crafted a photo album scrapbook, and collected one-of-a-kind objects that are currently housed in the Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University. The Herskovits Library seeks to create a digital exhibition integrating emerging and engaging technologies to animate these objects and media.

As local news organizations shrink, many civic advocates fear that no one will be monitoring the day-to-day processes that make city governments run. As part of their innovative approach to closing news gaps and promoting civic engagement, Chicago’s City Bureau has developed their “Documenters” program to train citizens to observe and record public meetings. As they develop this team of citizen journalists, they are now considering the complementary question: what is the most effective way to make the work they produce available and useful to Chicagoans?

For this project, the Northwestern student team will conduct design research and prototyping to explore solutions. Students will be expected to be in close contact with City Bureau’s team, with current documenters, and with engaged citizens who want to stay informed about what’s happening at the heart of these civic processes. Students should be prepared to go out into Chicago to meet with these people face to face for interviews, observations, and prototype testing.

Many important news stories are buried amidst huge numbers of documents. And sometimes, those documents are hard for news organizations to process, either because of the sheer number, or the formats in which the documents are published.

Chicago is a big city. And for many visitors, Chicago is the big city. Whether it’s for work or pleasure, when visitors travel to Chicago it means figuring out how to experience a city that’s both large and diverse. That can make it challenging for visitors to discover and enjoy all of Chicago’s unique neighborhoods and experiences. For this Knight Lab Studio project, students will partner with Choose Chicago (the official destination marketing organization for Chicago) to develop and deliver a conversational A.I. (“chatbot”) with a distinct and memorable personality that helps visitors find and experience more of Chicago.

Local governments hold a lot of meetings which are meant to allow the public to observe and comment on policy and legislation. But local news organizations are cutting back and often can’t cover them. Chicago’s City Bureau has developed a program called Documenters, which trains citizens and pays them to cover those meetings. Along the way, they have developed software which grabs not just the schedule of these meetings but the agendas, handouts, and other documents -- documents which may have important information about future plans and laws, but which usually go unread.

Census Reporter is a tool that helps journalists find and understand data from the US Census American Community Survey (ACS), making that data much more easily accessible and digestible. However, it only presents data from the most recent ACS releases.

Many newsrooms crank out a steady flow of government and politics stories. Behind the daily stories is a lot of history and context. How might newsrooms better organize their publishing to provide this background information? How should that background information be organized to support the casual audience who is trying to catch up? How should it be organized to serve the “political junkies” who want to see how all of the pieces connect?

After what seems like a never-ending election season, many folks are ready to think about anything else. On the other hand, millions of people are activated and ready to be more civically engaged. Traditional journalistic work mostly proceeds as though there’s nothing to do until the next time the polls open, but is that all there is? Meanwhile, activist organizations and social media users often don’t worry so much about facts and fairness. For this Knight Lab Studio project, we’ll conduct a broad design research study, looking for “civic media” opportunities which adapt and evolve journalism’s traditional role in supporting democratic society in light of how information systems really work today.

The Chicago Reporter and Univision Chicago have teamed up to create LATINEXT: a first-of-its-kind cross-platform news team to engage and address the information needs of the 2.1 million strong Latinx community in the Chicago region. This project is radically rethinking the relationship between the newsroom and the audience, “putting the service back in public service journalism.” For this Knight Lab Studio project, students will: conduct design research about the needs of this audience; help LATINEXT prepare to responsibly involve the community in the journalism process; and, propose a near-term roadmap for developing the project further.

The world is drowning in content. On Wordpress alone, 70 million posts are published per month. In an ocean of noise, how can you tell which ideas really resonate?

A year ago, the word “metaverse” was just a concept from a classic Science Fiction novel, but since then, it has leapt into the public conversation. But what does “metaverse” really mean? And how might the metaverse (or some metaverses) impact, or provide opportunities for journalism?

When people move to a new community, they have a million questions about their new home. Meanwhile, news organizations serving that community have an interest in “meeting” those new people and converting them into subscribers. The Indianpolis (“Indy”) Star, one of Medill’s Local News Initiative partners has identified this as an opportunity in their coverage area. This project provides the opportunity to work on a real challenge in media innovation and product development. Students will research the needs of newcomers to the Indianapolis metro area and prototype a service to meet those needs. This work will be done in consultation with the Indy Star, with a goal of designing an experiment for them to execute later this year.

“Open data" might be a buzzword, but there are still significant obstacles to taking advantage of valuable datasets. They can be hard to find, hard to clean, and hard to manage. Human-centered design and a little coding energy can make it substantially easier for people to find stories and explore data. This team will approach a high-value public data set and aim to make the data more usable.

Do the words journalists choose reveal unconscious political biases or create/reinforce similar biases? The 2016 and 2020 presidential elections made vicious and fierce rhetoric the norm and strong political identification a fact of life. The accusations of “fake news” and bias ring loudly, destroying the perception of a free and fair press and posing a threat to democracy. The challenge for this project is to develop a human-centered process and natural language processing tools to help journalists make less freighted word choices; that is, a detector for partisan language when covering political news.

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.

Students will design, develop, prototype and test one tool for community engagement, with a likely focus on the listening and information gathering stage.

In the popular imagination of American democracy, the press informs voters so that they can make the best choice at the polls. However, many citizens feel as though that contract has been broken. People are frustrated with “horse-race coverage” of elections—that is, journalism focused more on who is “electable”, who is “winning” and the mechanics of campaigning than on policy and helping voters make the best choice. Rather than seeking a technology-first solution, this project proposes to begin with Jay Rosen’s suggestion that journalists ask "what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes?" and work to make the coverage about that.

Publishing a story requires a constant balancing act: you have to get to your point, but you don’t always know whether your audience is fully up-to-speed on the content. Or maybe in your research you found some really fascinating information, but you have to admit it’s kind of a distraction from your main point. The web was developed on the promise of linking between documents, but too often a simple link fails -- it doesn’t give the reader much sense of what sort of information is at the end of the link, and it runs the risk of sending your audience off down a rabbit hole, never to return to your work.

How might we better understand how to reach our audience, delivering the right news at the right moment, or for the right mood, or for the right amount of time?

While quarantine has had most of us pretty home-bound, there’s no reason we can’t look ahead to the future. Travel journalism has always played a role in helping people learn about places to visit and prepare their journeys, but does it really “work” as well for the audience as it could? In this project, we’ll consider what people really need from travel journalism and how it could be made more useful for its audience.

Cooking often seems harder than it really is. The literature doesn't seem to help us here either. A lot of modern cooking instruction seems to be written in an overly-narrative style, often emphasizing prose aesthetics as much as practical instruction. Obscure techniques and exotic ingredients can leave one to wonder, what is essential to a recipe? What must be replicated and what can be simplified?

Students will examine conversational user interfaces—that’s to say, using chat as a medium to interact with a bot.

As local news sources dwindle there is one group of reporters in every community that continue to keep journalism alive: high school students. High School news and newspapers are the only source of news in many news deserts. They are also important for education in media literacy and the first exposure many people have to what journalism is. Many high school publications rely on free repurposed systems and content management systems to publish their work. They are often presented in forms that are different from their peers' typical media habits. There's an opportunity here to make high school journalism more relevant to not only youth in schools but also to their parents and communities.

As of 2020, consumers have already purchased more than 2 billion Augmented Reality (AR) capable smartphones. By 2022, that number will be 3.4 billion. This huge installed base presents news organizations with the best opportunity to explore spatial 3D media with their audiences.

In this project, Knight Lab students will make exploring mobile AR easier for small teams and individuals, by developing and publishing a series of guides on how to make AR features using open source and low cost software.

Students will learn by doing, developing skills along the whole production pipeline, from asset creation, to development and design, to deployment. We will produce at least three AR projects over the course of the quarter. Each project will contain at least one 3d model of a food item produced by photogrammetry, the process of constructing a 3d model from 2d photos.

We chose food as the theme because it taps into an existing culture of sharing tabletop photos on social media and requires a lot of detail in order to be captured in a compelling way. We’re also interested in the potential mobile AR has to bring food journalism into our audience’s homes in a much more literal way. Are you more likely to feel confident approaching a recipe if you see the ingredients laid out on your own countertop beforehand? Can a 3d model illustrate the difference between two kinds of tomatoes more effectively than a flat photograph? Would you try more unusual foods if you could inspect them close up in 3d on your phone first?

This is a great project for students with experience and interest in photography, 3D modeling, writing, graphic and interaction design. Students coming from a software background will have the opportunity to learn about graphics optimization, how AR technologies work, working with SDKs and deploying projects to the web. Tools we’ll explore will include Figma, Meshroom, Blender, Torch and the Spark AR Studio for creating Facebook and Instagram filters.

Automated Photogrammetry. As AR and VR increasingly becomes the focus as we move away from smartphones, media organizations will have to find ways to produce content native to those mediums. These same organizations have a wealth of stories that continue to have value over time. Flat video and photo will become less desirable as we continue to move into these new spaces. Previous projects in the lab have surfaced an opportunity to take existing video and process it using photogrammetry software to produce a 3D model.

An experimental design project that explores visualizing data in three dimensions for augmented reality. Visualizations that can be examined and inspected by physically getting closer or understood by walking around them, open up exciting possibilities for how we communicate complex ideas and data that reveals hidden truths.

An experimental design project, in which we students are analyzing methods for communicating data visually and exploring how those principles might be transferred and transformed in a 360 environment.

An experimental design project that explores an emerging concept of information spaces. This concept is behind Microsoft’s pivot to create future Windows operating systems that exist in mixed reality headsets. Students will explore the concept of a news/information app that exists in AR and/or VR. For example, a political news feed might exist on a wall in your living room, and breaking news would appear on a coffee table, twitter reactions surround the coffee table on the floor. Students will also explore the same concept in a virtual environment.

3d technology gives us the opportunity to tell the story of an object from all angles. With 3d scans we can examine tiny butterfly wings, visit distant archaeological sites and get up close to objects too fragile to be examined in real life. While 3d gives the viewer the ability to see the whole story, it’s often difficult to know just what to look at and how to construct meaning from this wealth of information.

Augmented Reality allows creators to tell stories in the places where they actually happened. For the purpose of this project, we’ll be working with the concept of physical accessibility on campus. We will use the Unity game engine and a framework developed at Knight Lab so that we can quickly experiment and refine our ideas. We’ll spend some time early in the quarter looking at AR experiences from museums and tourist attractions as well as games like Ingress and Pokemon Go. From there, we’ll build an app and start testing it with users, refining ideas as we go along. We’ll consider the differences between gamified apps that include scavenger hunts or challenges and AR applications that lay out information in a more traditional way.

Though many in journalism are excited about VR, few are addressing real issues with making it attractive and interactive for their audience. This story team will explore the idea of making multiple three-dimensional VR photos around a scene and linking them together so that the user can navigate it. They’ll be exploring complex VR design challenges, such as how to move around space without disorienting the user and how to easily author interactive environments.

Advancements in neuroscience and immersive technologies offer mechanisms for engineering an entirely new mode of performance art one that engages audiences to unprecedented degree. Using the latest VR production techniques, students used motion capture and machine learning to teach a computer to improvise a performance, creating an engaging VR experience.

In this project, students will use modern approaches to making 3D images both with hardware and software processing.

Imagine that any wall, building floor or doorway could come alive and tell stories. Using projection mapping, many artists, advertisers and industries are already doing it. In this project, students will explore ways in which projection mapping is currently being used and adapt them for journalistic purposes. Students will build and prototype their adaptations.

This Knight Lab project explores the power of Augmented Reality (AR) for public storytelling. Participating students will collaborate with conceptual artist, Bradley McCallum, to create an innovative exhibition that honors the life of freelance war correspondent James Wright Foley.

In this project, students will film 360 video and explore the best ways to add on that additional layer; students will finish the quarter with two videos, and will document their findings to make their storytelling methods more accessible to others.

Tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are shaking up the art world in large part because they are accessible for almost anyone to use. The limits of what they can create is still being tested. Many journalism articles lack visuals which are essential in today's platform centric media landscape. A tool to automagically generate art for many of those articles could help smaller newsrooms without a budget for visuals (art/photography).

Tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are shaking up the art world in large part because they are accessible for almost anyone to use. The limits of what they can create is still being tested. Many journalism articles lack visuals which are essential in today's platform centric media landscape. We have several projects that utilize AI art for journalism but the trained model is problematic. This project builds on previous quarter's work of training an editorial model that minimizes stereotypes, sexism and racism for editorial use.

Artificial intelligence (AI) drives innovation at news organizations around the world. Journalists use algorithms to find patterns in data to inform investigations and identify breaking news. Automation enables more efficient news production. AI helps drive subscriptions and personalize news for consumers. Yet AI advantages are largely limited to larger, national and international media. Many small, locally focused newsrooms lack the resources and skills to understand the potential of AI and are afraid to commit to experiments without a clear payoff.

The Knight Foundation has funded an initiative to help local news organizations expand their use of AI, harnessing it for long-term sustainability. As part of this effort, The Associated Press and the Knight Lab are developing a scorecard for AI newsroom readiness. The benchmark will help news organizations determine whether they are ready to implement AI systems.

In this Knight Lab Studio project, students will work with AP’s technology leaders and Knight Lab to develop a framework for testing and assessing a newsroom's AI readiness. This includes researching best practices, interviewing those news outlets already using AI, and those who wish to. It also includes evaluating and recommending effective product designs for the scorecard to maximize its usage and performance.

Coding skills are not required to participate in this project.

News sites like Politifact and Factcheck.org have defined a whole genre of journalism that pursues fact checking as a public activity, its own form of coverage and content. There is a large audience demand for factchecking. For instance, NPR’s live factcheck of the first 2016 presidential debates led to record site traffic. But journalists’ attention is limited, and given the endless sea of things people say, how should journalists go about identifying and ranking the most newsworthy and important things to fact check?

Did you know that people working in news organizations have created or contributed to some of the most popular open source software in the world? Among others, the Django content management system was developed at the Lawrence Journal-World, and the creator of D3.js worked at the New York Times for several years. News organizations have constrained budgets to purchase commercial software, and also often need control over the code they use, so building with open source tools is key.

There's more information than ever, and often, the audience is left wondering whether they should trust what they hear. What systems could we build that help people simply answer the question, "is that true?"

Using a combination of raw search and the collections of regular expressions, build a system that would allow a user to ask questions about what is happening in the news and get back answers and pointers to sources. In the vein of Watson, multiple approaches to matching against text for different types of questions would be used to find answers.  This is envisioned as text (rather than voice) driven system.

Creative Co-author is a creative writing enhancement tool that focuses primarily on pounding out the first draft. It is type-ahead cranked up to eleven. It types ahead, lurks behind, and generally peers over your shoulder while you pound out words in a speed-draft writing reverie.

Traditional, centralized news organizations are failing the emerging majority of Americans. The current average age of cable news viewers is 60 and the racial diversity of newsrooms has not budged since the 1970s. Yet most Americans are now under the age of 40 and members of either the Millennial or Z generations, the two most heterogeneous in American history. — Imara Jones

What do Bitcoin, democracy and journalism have in common? Not much at the moment, but as blockchain technology is really taking off and decentralizing power in finance, the potential application of those models and tools in other industries and governments is getting a lot of people excited. The concept of programmed organization and rules has people excited about how that can be used to curb bias and create more reflective representation and allow a diversity of voices to help drive the organization. The idea of DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) is still a utopian dream at the moment but the idea is catching fire in finance and government operations. We think journalism should be one of the early use-cases as the idea and technology develops. Even if it addresses just a fraction of the systemic inequity we see in our industry today, it would have been worth it.

For all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas. — Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee What do Bitcoin, security and journalism have in common? Not much at the moment, but as Web3 and smart contracts on blockchains are starting to take off and decentralize power in finance, their application in other industries and governments is getting a lot of people excited.

You may have heard of NFTs. You may even know that NFT stands for Non-fungible token. Most of the hype around these digital assets is in the digital art market, but Time Magazine, The New York Times and others have sold NFTs of their articles and photographs. The New York Times Buy This Column in the Blockchain! originally sold for 350 Ether, which is around $1.5 Million dollars at the time this description is being written. The Associated Press's collection of 24,000 Unique Moments NFTs sold out in just over one minute! The demand from collectors is there. This project seeks to explore how NFT digital assets can leverage assets from other types of news organizations: quite literally proving the value of journalism. There's a lot to be excited about here.

You may have heard of NFTs. You may even know that NFT stands for Non-fungible token. Most of the hype around these digital assets is in the digital art market, but Time Magazine, The New York Times and others have sold NFTs of their articles and photographs.

Automated live streaming data dashboards and curated video mosaics of other live streams have become popular on platforms like Twitch. Stock checkers, inventory checkers and multi-streams of protests have all done well on Twitch. They inform their niche audience with real-time data and video in a way that other journalism organizations can’t. What other types of streaming data might meet the needs of an audience on Twitch? For this project, a team of students will research and identify real-time data sources that could meet the needs of a potential audience. The team will then build a dashboard using web technologies that could be streamed to Twitch. Some collaboration with the Live Streaming the News project will occur throughout the quarter in an effort to find the right audience for the stream and foster a community.

In recent years, much attention has been drawn to the social and cultural identities of journalists, and the ways in which those identities are often quite different from those of the audiences those journalists cover. From race and gender to education level and economic class, audiences and even the news organizations are looking for data to help them put stories into perspective. For this project, students will focus on the design of a system which could help track and convey this information. They will research how underrepresented communities perceive different news organizations as well as what people in the field of journalism have already been exploring in this area. They will identify key identity types or other traits that advance this understanding; they will explore what it would take to gather and sustain a database like this; and, they will explore and test multiple data visualization concepts to see which are the most effective for making sense of the data. If students identify promising paths to building and sustaining a tool like this, Knight Lab is interested in the future possibility of developing this into an ongoing public project.

What would it take to automatically create a brief documentary about someone’s life? For this project, we’ll try to do just that. Given a biographical document (for example, a person’s Wikipedia page), can we extract key facts of their life, search the internet for still images that might illustrate those facts, and compose a brief video clip that puts together text (converted to speech) and images? We’ll do as much of it as we can in ten weeks, and if work is promising, continue in a future Knight Lab Studio session.

Generative AI is transforming all kinds of industries, including local news. Newsrooms need to know what tools to trust, how best to use them, and what they might cost. Automation can aid writers, create images, detect patterns in data, identify potential news events, promote content, convert articles to email newsletters and much more. Local news needs a playbook for automation.

After many years of flying high, public sentiment around social media in general, and specifically around certain platforms has turned sour. A 2020 Pew Research Survey found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that social media has a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in this country. In a recent article on the Columbia Journalism Review, Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen wrote “When Elon Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter last year, journalists around the world looked on in alarm,” and those fears earned credence weeks later when Musk banned journalists who criticized him from Twitter.

Editorial fact-checking is a mess at best and readers don't see the benefits. Typically they doubt it happens or don't appreciate the work it takes to make it happen. On the editing side, almost everyone who does it uses an antiquated process derived from print production habits even though most writers and editors are drafting in Google Docs. This can be better. Let's make it better for both editorial and readers!

Each year, political campaigns break records for money raised and spent. Where does all that money come from? Who’s giving it? What are their interests in supporting any given candidate? Researching these questions has become a key part of national political coverage, and between the Federal Election Commission and various public interest organizations, basic access to campaign finance data is well understood. Things are much different for state and local elections. Reporting regulations vary considerably from state to state, and local news organizations are often short of the resources required to deal with the complexity of even gathering contribution data, let alone analyzing it.

Freelance journalists struggle to connect with editors, land assignments and establish steady cash flow. Meanwhile, news organizations need freelancers with diverse experiences and subject matter expertise to contribute a broad array of articles, photographs and other content. The Center for Independent Journalists (The CIJ) launched in September 2021 aiming to bridge the gap between these groups by providing support, community, education, tools and advocacy to freelancers and by offering editors access to a diverse group of independent journalists. For this project, the team will seek to better understand the barriers of information, trust and communication that prevent editors from hiring diverse freelancers -- which ultimately often ends up pushing freelancers of color out of the field. In consultation with the Center for Independent Journalists, students on this project will conduct design research and develop concepts and prototypes of a matching system which may inform future development by the CIJ.

This project will build upon prototypes and research conducted in the Fall 2019 Studio class, but participation is open to any interested student. As the open-web continues to die, storytellers need tools that help them create sharable artifacts suitable for a variety of social networks and platforms. Brevity and portability are of the utmost importance. This project is concerned with designing a tool that allows novice storytellers to create simple 5 frame (5 images) GIFS that when combined with text for the post, are sharable on a variety of platforms and social networks. This iteration of the project will be focused on UX and UI design and building a sustainable application for the creation of visual stories saved in the GIF file format.

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.

Juxtapose helps storytellers compare two pieces of similar media, including photos, and GIFs. It’s ideal for highlighting then/now stories that explain slow changes over time (growth of a city skyline, regrowth of a forest, etc.) or before/after stories that show the impact of single dramatic events (natural disasters, protests, wars, etc.). This popular tool could be more useful to storytellers and web-makers if it had a couple of key features that have come up in user feedback. Auto aligning images and animated GIF social sharing are two features that would be of great improvements.

Since the last elections, public interest in contacting elected representatives about legislation under consideration has boomed. News organizations could do better addressing the public's interest in understanding how their representatives are planning to vote on various issues.

Platforms like Twitch are growing audience at break-neck speed thanks in part to covid lockdowns. But we haven’t seen as much interest among most news organizations. When we do see legacy news organizations streaming to places like Twitch or YouTube live, they simply stream their broadcast instead of creating native content that allows user engagement. The form tends to be much more casual and success tends to come from interacting with the audience to a degree we rarely see from a news organization.

It’s hard to run a local news organization. Advertising dollars have been siphoned away by social media platforms; audiences have many more choices of where to spend their attention and their money. These times call for creative thinking and reassessment of how local news organizations spend their energy and money.

Music fans today have trouble finding the stories they want to read. Following all your favorite artists on social media is overwhelming, and searching Google turns up page after page of irrelevant junk. We'll build a system that finds just what a fan wants to read.

Algorithmic news curation aggregators (e.g. Google News) are sometimes known to personalize the selection of stories shown to individuals. But far less is known about the potential for article-level personalization in which an article is automatically re-written to appeal to different types of users, perhaps even adapted to each individual. Could this be used to manipulate, persuade, inform, or engage people more effectively? The goal of this project is to prototype one or more templates for automated news articles that adapt to different types of people or individuals based on a given user model based on the types of information a news site might know (e.g. gender, age, race, location, interest-level, etc.). These templates will be used to produce personalizable news articles that are published to the web.

Create a mobile application which could be used by a news organization to involve their audience in covering a festival while having fun.

Over the past few years, we have seen increased attention to the problem of bias. AI systems built on a substrate of machine learning are increasingly being seen as biased. Automated information delivery systems (e.g., Facebook, twitter) are using algorithms that, by their nature, are biased in the type of news they recommend. And we now have an entire class of language models constructed using millions of documents that are demonstrably biased. One could argue that bias is impossible to avoid but this project is an attempt to do so.

Studies have shown that people on opposing sides of political issues use fundamentally different language to discuss their views. One of the effects of this is that people living in News Filter Bubbles can immediately notice and then discard stories that use the terms associated with their opposition.

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.

The aim of this project is to provide users with a conversational interface to data sets that allow them to first describe what the data is about, where the various elements that they can ask about can be found, and then ask questions about the data.

As local papers are forced to cut back on coverage and struggle to survive, the future of local news is uncertain. Some communities are even considered “news deserts” with little to no local information. What can be done to increase the volume of local news? The goal of this project is to address this issue by considering how national reporting can be augmented with a local angle based on data.

As we work, we often need information to support our thinking. This often requires turning away from the work, pulling up an engine and then typing in a query. If you are writing, however, the queries that we need are already embedded in the text of the document we are authoring.

As we settle into the new world of Zoom, Meet and Teams, it is clear that even when the dust clears, these platforms are not going away. Each is developing its own feature set, but few are focused on the idea that we now can capture interaction information at a more detailed level and with a better signal to noise ratio than we were able to do in face to face meetings. Exploiting both these features, ubiquitous use of Zoom and its siblings and the information we can pull out of them, we would like to consider what it might mean for Zoom to be a conduit for information. In particular, how can we use the Zoom APIs to access information requests (bios, company profiles, general search) that leverage both the specific requests and the shared context.

Sensor journalism uses sensors to collect information about our environment. It opens new possibilities for journalists enabling them to collect and process data that might not be available or at a level of detail not previously available.

The average person today that has a smartphone, walks around leaking information about themselves over radio signals. WiFi, bluetooth and NFC radiate personal information into the public airwaves. These signals can tell you a lot about a person without their knowledge. To raise awareness around privacy and security for digital devices, this project will seek to create a “mirror” that reflects back information that is radiating out from anyone who stands in front of it. Frequencies include: RFID cell phones, WiFi, bluetooth, Misc RF at 900Mhz 2.4Ghz 5Ghz

SensorGrid is Knight Lab's experimental prototype environmental sensor wireless network system. This project will focus on the design and development of the web API and user dashboard for SensorGrid data management and presentation.