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Grano StoryWeb

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We treat journalism as the act of writing a piece of text, when it is much better understood as weaving a series of related facts into a narrative. Storyweb aims to reflect this, and help to structure the thought behind a story.

While the idea of structured journalism has been around for a while, Storyweb is an experiment in how tightly we can join the process of collecting and selecting rich, networked research data with the process of actually writing a story.

Storyweb creates a journalistic memory that can be shared inside a research team and automatically enriched both with material from a news organizations archives and with public data from governments and companies.


This is an implementation of text-snippet based SNA; the idea that data in a social network isn't necessarily well-structured but can also be little pieces of text that link to each other (and to entities).

Original mockup: here.

Installation

Before you can install storyweb, the following dependencies are required:

  • A SQL database. While we recommend Postgres, the app can also run with other databases, such as SQLite.
  • ElasticSearch for full-text indexing.
  • less, installed via npm.
  • Python, and Python virtualenv.
  • RabbitMQ

Once these dependencies are satisfied, run the following command to install the application:

git clone https://github.com/granoproject/storyweb.git storyweb
cd storyweb
virtualenv env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py develop
npm install -g bower uglify-js

Next, you need to customize the configuration file. Copy the template configuration file, settings.py.tmpl to a new file, e.g. settings.py in the project root and set the required settings. Then export the environment variable TMI_SETTINGS to point at this file:

cp settings.py.tmpl settings.py
export STORYWEB_SETTINGS=`pwd`/settings.py

Use bower to install javascript dependencies:

bower install

To create a new database and search index, run the following command:

python storyweb/manage.py upgrade

This will also create an admin user with the email address admin@grano.cc and the password admin which you can use to log in and create more users.

Congratulations, you've installed storyweb. You can run the application using:

python storyweb/manage.py runserver

Credits

This tool is heavily inspired by Newsclip.se, a hack from the Al Jazeera "Media in Context" hackathon in December 2014. Thanks to the team: Eva Constantaras, Kasia Dybek, Bruno Faviero, Heinze Havinga, Friedrich Lindenberg, Phillip Smith.

It is licensed under an open source MIT license. We welcome any contributions to the code base.

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