Check out this beautiful tool for combining story with maps. With a $35,000 grant from the Knight Prototype Fund, creators of the cloud-computing platform CartoDB have released a beta of the open-source tool.
CartoDB hopes the tool will push the art of storytelling into new bounds, rather than the traditional form of text, photos and videos.
The Knight Prototype Fund was established about a year-and-a-half ago, says Chris Barr, media innovation associate at the Knight Foundation. The fund looks to help experiments move forward to keep up with the pace of technology and innovation. The Knight Foundation funds about $100 million worth of grants per year, $30 million to $40 million of which goes toward the journalism and media innovation program.
Barr, who heads the prototype fund, said the foundation wanted to speed up its grant-making cycle to rapidly create new tools for journalists and publishers to use.
“I think the public is going to want more and more of these kinds of experiences that help us make sense of the large amount of information and data that we have at our disposal,” he said.
According to TeckCrunch this open-source tool that utilizes maps to help turn data into interactive multimedia stories without the user needing coding skills.
http://cartodb.github.io/odyssey.js/