Writers and Editors

The Internet hugely expands our ability to search for text, images, and information. Digitalization allows us to explore many kinds of media on a laptop. New technologies provide new ways not only to explain complex subjects but to make old explanations and stories come alive. VidLits, resembling movie trailers, are increasingly used to promote books. Personal historians are not only helping people write their memoirs and family histories but are producing tribute and memorial videos (check out the tribute to Suzie, an old man's dog). Graphic novels are expanding our concept of fiction. Newspapers such as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune are exploring online multimedia presentations of their big series. All of these changes make the head swim. What new skills must we learn, what new technologies master? We may have trouble keeping up, but think of the possibilities.

You can download free (on the Web) most of the software you need to watch video online. At a minimum you probably need Adobe Reader, RealPlayer, and Flash. Download them from a government site and they're likely to be safe!

Welcome to Pine Point. If you have ten or fifteen minutes, take a look at this truly interesting approach to storytelling/​history, from Canada's National Film Board: the story (part book, part film, part family photo album) of Pine Point, a mining town that existed only long enough to give a generation or two some memories--and was then erased from the map. A key character is Richard Cloutier, a bully in high school who later, severely disabled from MS, issues voice commands to his computer mouse, in developing the Pine Point website. Created for IDFA DocLab by filmmakers Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge (the Goggles). (Scroll to bottom and click on Visit Website.)
Trady Boyer, on Innovative Interactivity (1-24-11), discusses technical details about the use of Flash, of interest to multimedia enthusiasts.

The Adventures of Comma Boy by Keith Cronin (a comic strip for aspiring writers, agents, publishers, and publishing fantasizers, featured in Publishers Marketplace. Comma Boy archives here.

Alternative story forms (slideshow of time-saving story forms, including Q&A, key player summaries, quick profiles, explainer photos, lists, panels, quizzes, charticles, and glossaries.

Anecdote: Making Stories Work (check out this organization's interesting white papers)

Animating data. Making Data Dance, an Economist story (12-9-10): Hans Rosling, a Swedish lecturer on global health, "has become an online star by using data visualisations to make serious points about health policy and development." Do not miss The Joy of Stats, a 4-minute video clip from BBC4, or No More boring data, a 20-minute TEDTalk video, among other videos available online. Go to Rosling's Gapminder website for more videos or info on how to use available software to animate data.

Artful medicine: A longtime collaboration (Surgeon Robert Jackler and illustrator Chris Grallap explain how they work and the secret to nearly 25 years of innovative medical illustration, YouTube video). Text on same topic: Illustrations convey body’s secrets (Tracie White, Stanford, 8-8-11)

Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), a social and professional network of 750+ producers – both independent and those employed by media organizations – representing a range of disciplines, from NPR news journalists and reporters, to sound artists, station-based producers, podcasters, gearheads, media activists, and more. Provide resources to help independent producers navigate the public media industry. Check out AIR's week-long Sounds Elemental producer intensives.

Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) ( individuals and organizations concerned with the acquisition, description, preservation, exhibition and use of moving image materials)

Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, a book by by Errol Morris, brings together six essays (each about a photograph or group of photographs) that originally appeared on The New York Times‘ Opinionator blog. In an interesting review, Shaun Mullen (on The Moderate Voice writes that a good many books "tread the same path as does Morris, but where Believing Is Seeing parts company with them is that Morris muses on where in a photograph does the truth lie? And is the truth altered if a photograph is posed." Note that first photo on the Mullen review.

Ben Greenman's Museum of Silly Charts (I Love Charts)

Bit by Electronic Bit, a Cantor’s Voice Is Restored. Joseph Berger (NYTimes 7-20-10) on how a 52-year-old non-techie Hasidic Jew who runs a record shop in Brooklyn, with advice from some experts, used advanced audio restoration programs on a regular computer to get rid of the crackles and hisses in old recordings of a "Jewish Caruso," a "Cantor for the Ages."

Books about Songwriting (for aspiring songwriters)
• Craft and Business of Songwriting (3rd edition), by John Braheny
• Shortcuts to Hit Songwriting: 126 Proven Techniques for Writing Songs That Sell by Robin A. Frederick
• The Songwriting Sourcebook: How to Turn Chords into Great Songs by Rikky Rooksby
• Writing Better Lyrics by Pat Pattison
• hortcuts to Songwriting for Film & TV: 114 Tips for Writing, Recording, & Pitching in Today's Hottest Market by Robin Frederick
• TuneSmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting by Jimmy Webb (autobiography and craft, mixed)
This will get you started anyway. Have we missed anything?

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Books on visual storytelling:
• Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels by Scott McCloud, the author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
• Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang (a children's book illustrator explains how images help elicit emotion in story readers)
• Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children's Books by Uri Shulevitz (a masters class in illustrating books for kids).
• Book of Movie Photography by David Cheshire (a guide to telling stories through images)
Thanks to Upstart Crow for leading us to these titles!

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Charting data. How to Choose the Best Chart for Your Data (Alan Henry, Lifehacker, 5-11-12). Love the illustration: "Every time you make a powerpoint, edward tufte kills a kitten." See also How to Find the Right Chart Type for your Numeric Data (Digital Inspiration, Tech ΰ la carte, 1-14-09) and Chart Chooser (Juice Analytics). Use the filters to find the right chart type for your needs. Then download as Excel or PowerPoint templates and insert your data. Filters: Comparison, distribution, composition, trend, relationship, table.

Chart Girl (Hilary Sargent sums up complicated stories and issues in easy-to-follow black and white infographic charts, which you can download as ready-to-print PDFs)

Compilations of Great Quotations
• William Cronon's Favorite Quotations
• Quotations About History (collected by Ferenc Szasz of the University of New Mexico, on William Cronon's website)
• Quotations about Science (The Quotation Page)
• ThinkExist.com (a good searchable source for quotations)
• The Quote Garden (another searchable quotation site)

• The Disappearing Double Chin Trick for Portrait Photography (EDW Lynch, LaughingSquid.com, 7-18-12). Photographer Peter Hurley demonstrates how to take more flattering portraits by having the subject adjust their head position slightly in order to accentuate the jawline (and remove the “double chin”). About 7 minutes into the video, Hurley shows a series of comparison photos—the difference is remarkable.

Design. These books may be helpful:
• Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers by A. Schriver
• Type & Layout: Are You Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes by Colin Wheildon
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd edition) and his other books: Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative /a> (and there are others!)

Digital Imaging Guidelines (guidelines prepared by the UPDIG Coalition, to establish photographic standards and practices for photographers, designers, printers, and image distributors). The guidelines cover Digital Asset Management, Color Profiling, Metadata, and Photography Workflow.

FileInfo.com, a searchable database of thousands of file extensions with detailed information about the associated file types. You can use FileInfo.com to look up information about unknown file types and find programs that open the files. Along the left you'll find categories of common file types: text files, data files, audio files, 3D image files, raster image files, vector image files, page layout files, spreadsheet files, executable files, game files, CAD files, GIS files, Web files, Plugin files, font files, system files, settings files, encoded files, compressed files, disk image files, developer files, backup files, and misc. files. Who knew?? Subsections of the site (helpful for personal historians, especially) include:
• Answers to common questions about file extensions
• Audio File Types (includes compressed and uncompressed audio formats, which contain waveform data that can be played with audio playback software. This category also includes MIDI files, musical scores, and audio project files, which typically do not contain audio data).
• Video File Types (a wide range of video formats, which use different codecs to encode and compress video data)
• Software Information (another helpful section of the FileInfo.com, with information about popular software programs and a star-rating system to indicate a program's popularity).
• Page Layout file types
• Vector Image Files . It sez there: "Vector graphics are made up of paths, rather than individual pixels. These paths can be used to represent lines and shapes within the image. Most vector image formats can also include colors, gradients, and image effects. Since vector graphics store image data as paths, they can be enlarged without losing quality, which makes them a good choice for logos and other types of drawings. Common vector image file extensions include .EPS, .AI, and .SVG. Other image file categories include Raster Graphic and 3D Image files."

Find a Story to Hear Wherever It May Be, Katie Boehret's story about a new company called Broadcastr (broadcastr.com), which is still working out the kinks in its free social-networking platform based on location-specific storytelling. Touring New Orleans? Listen to stories told by flood survivors or about where the best Cajun food is.(All Things Digital column, Wall Street Journal, 3-1-11)

Forgetfulness Billy Collins Animated Poetry

42 Different Ways That Artists Can Earn Money... (Digital Music News 2-15-12)

Graphics Atlas (Image Permanence Institute). This online collection compares processes (ranging from the woodcut to modern digital print), compares traits across processes, and gives instructions on how to identify print processes.

Graphics that help readers visualize data (a few samples). Sometimes you have to plow through ads to get to the meat:
• Obama's 2011 Budget Proposal: How It's Spent Rectangles in the chart are sized according to the amount of spending for that category. Color shows the change in spending from 2010.
• 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization (Web Designer Depot)
• Data Visualization: Modern Approaches (Vitaly Friedman, Smashing Magazine 8-2-07)
• Murder: New York City (NY Times)
• Visualizing information flow in science (Well-Formed.Eigenfactor.org)
• Information Is Beautiful (see more examples below).

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Gratitude (Louis Schwartzberg's video talk for TedTalkSF, 10 minutes worth watching). Using time-lapsed photography he creates living images, some of which accompany an inspirational talk by an elder. See more of his work at MovingArt.tv).

Hidden Meanings in 12 Popular Logos (Vicki Passmore, WalletPop, 1-14-11)

Information Is Beautiful displays data beautifully (hover on images for more info; click on them for data sources). Credit David McCandless, author of The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World's Most Consequential Trivia and collaborators. Some examples:
• Snake Oil? Scientific evidence for popular dietary supplements (version 2)
• Which Fish Are Okay to Eat?
• The HBO Recycling Program How the network keeps your favorite actors in Premium Cable Purgatory (Andy Greenwald, Grantland 6-8-11) with visualization enlarged.
• The Varieties of Intimate Relationship
• Left vs. Right (U.S.) and Left vs. Right (World)
• Wikipedia's lamest editorial wars
• When Sea Levels Attack!

Interactive maps. Some examples: When Did Your County's Jobs Disappear (an interactive map illustrating Chris Wilson's story, Slate, 8-10-2009); The Geography of Jobs (TIP); Online Interactive Maps (educational maps, for children AND adults!); Measure of America measuring levels of human development in various states.

JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments, the first PubMed-indexed video methods journal in biology)

Language: What Lies Beneath (NPR special)

Layers Magazine, a how-to magazine for everything Adobe, with tutorials and columns that often analyze and illustrate design makeovers.

LENS, the excellent New York Times blog on photography, video, and visual journalism (including this entry: From North Korea, an Altered Procession (in which J. David Goodman shows how North Korea's state news agency digitally altered photos transmitted to the world)

Library of Life (interactive graphic showing human gene mutation from washingtonpost.com story on Gene Therapy and Cancer)

Like that Chrysler Super Bowl ad with Clint Eastwood? Thank a poet. (Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times 2-6-12--with video). One of the most powerful ads aired during the 2012 Super Bowl credits poet Matthew Dickman as one of its copywriters.

Lives Connected (an experiment in oral history and data visualization, featuring Hurricane Katrina experiences)

Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye (Sonny Radio, When the Saints Go Marching In)

Mad Money (well-illustrated interactive story about Museum of Arts and Design Donors, on Portfolio.com)

A man, his dog, his cat, and his rat (a popular YouTube video)

Maps and mapmakers:
• Map Resources (royalty-free vector maps)
• Maps.com
• MollyMaps . Artist with PhD in geography/​cartography designs custom maps (hand-drawn, digital, or custom), starting at $200
• Maps That Changed the World. Peter Barber, head of maps collections at the British Library, shows ten of the greatest maps, from the USSR's Be On Guard! map (1921) to the London Tube Map (1933) to Google Earth. Fascinating.

Mary Ellen's Will: The Battle for 4949 Swiss ( a Dallas Morning News special multimedia report by Lee Hancock)

Mastering Multimedia (online tutorial and blogs)

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Medical and scientific images and illustrations (a partial list of sources)
• AnatLine, National Library of Medicine's database of anatomical images, with online browser
• Anatquest (visually compelling ways to bring anatomic images,including 3D renderings and labeled views, from the Visible Human dataset to the general public (with no-cost license agreement).
• Doctor Stock (rights-managed medical and healthcare images)
• DPDx Parasite Image Library
• Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) , National Library of Medicine
• Library of Congress Prints & Photographs
• Medical Illustration Source Book (The Association of Medical Illustrators, with online portfolios)
over 1 million images and 2,000 hours of broadcast quality film footage.
• NASA Multimedia Video Gallery
• National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery
• Netter Images (medical illustrations)
• NIH Photo Galleries
• NOAA's Photo Library
• PHIL (CDC's Public Health Image Library)
• U.S. Department of Agriculture Image Gallery (Agricultural Research Service)
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Digital Library
• U.S. Geological Survey Multimedia Gallery
• The Visible Human Project (NLM)

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Multimedia Storytelling Reaches Technological Heights with Brian Storm. Stefani Twyford, on Visualseer ("Extending art online") reports on an all-day workshop on multimedia storytelling, featuring Brian Storm of MediaStorm, a New York City based multimedia production company. The event, held Saturday March 22, 2010, was organized by Facebook and Twitter.FotoFest.

PowerPoint. Edward R. Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within ($7), and you can read a sample here of why understanding PowerPoint is particularly important with technical material: PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports (Tufte analyzes one incident of flawed PowerPoint, in a Boeing analysis of launch damage to the space shuttle Columbia, arguing that poor PowerPoint design led to grave misinterpretations of Columbia's vulnerability and to Columbia blowing up on re-entry). Go here for links to many more Tufte essays by the author of the classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (now in its second edition).

Printing images: What file size do you need? (resolution needed in pixels, ppi)

Snow Fall: Avalanche at Tunnel Creek (video, part of a multimedia piece (NY Times, 12-21-12 ), John Branch's harrowing story of skiers caught in an avalanche.

TED (Technology, Education, Design)
• TED Talks (videos and snippets from the best talks at TED conferences, designed to spread ideas (at $2000 a registration)
• TED (ideas worth spreading, the official site)
• TedEd Series (great audiovisual explanations from the people who brought us TedTalks)
• TED conferences

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Timeline Tools
• 7 Eye-popping interactive timelines (and 3 ways to create one) (Media Bistro, 10,000 Words 10-30-08). One of the methods has disappeared from the Web. For portfolios always screenshot your work, advises a handout from the 2012 ACES conference.
• How to Use Interactive Time Lines in Breaking News & Ongoing Stories (Mallary Jean Tenore, Poynter, 3-10-10, updated 3-4-11)
Some timeline-building tools:
• Dipity
• Timetoast
• Timeglider
• ProPublica Timelinesetter
• Intersect (has timeline creating tools)
• Memolane (has timeline creating tools)
• Timeline JS (beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use--free; a project of the Knight News Innovation Lab)
These are sources recommended in the linking workshop at the ACES 2012 National Conference.

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Tom Lehrer, So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III) , shown here on YouTube singing and playing one of a number of songs featured in a two-disc CD/​DVD of old classics, one of a number of songs featured in The Tom Lehrer Collection, favorites from a beloved master of social-political satire set to music.

VidLits--examples of book trailers from one of the first sources
• Laura Sydell's NPR story about Web 'VidLits,' featuring Yiddish with Dick and Jane
• The Dog Dialed 911
• Julie and Julia (brings out the book's appeal, which is different from the movie's)
• Liz Dubelman's "Craziest" (8 minutes and a 'must-see' for Scrabble fans)
• Yiddish with George and Laura
• More VidLits

ViewChange.org Stories Powering Progress.Watch videos about various developing countries."Using the power of video to tell stories about real people and progress in global development. Working with non-profit organizations, film distributors, and individual filmmakers, we combine at one site documentaries, news reports, and viewer-generated films of varying length and style. They are being shown both here and on the Link TV national television network, which reaches 47 million US homes." Funded by the Gates Foundation.