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.
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 vianpm.- 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
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.