Jeremy Gilbert : Design Thinker, Professor and Multimedia Journalist

Created during a 2011 Winter Quarter class I co-taught with McCormick School of Engineering Professor Larry Birnbaum, Living Stories won third place in AEJMC’s 2011 Best of the Web design contest for Team Innovation.

About: Living Stories
Conveys the emotional impact of an unfolding news story through the voices of people involved and the powerful images that show the issues.

Project description
Given the name of a news event, like Libyan crisis, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan or the Wisconsin protests, this system finds news articles and extracts powerful quotes from the articles. It also finds relevant photos and displays them together in a news stream. Because the focus is on the experience of the story, anyone, news junkie or not, can dip into the stream without confusion.

Potential Audience
Living Stories can be used by news organizations — using just their exclusive content. This system can also be viewed by individual web users or displayed as an installation in a lobby or other public space.

Future work
Currently the stories are manually selected but the selection of stories could be automated. The stories could also be augmented through the use of a timeline — navigable by the user.

Student Team:

• Sarah Alsulaiman, Computer Science
• Phil Bencomo, Journalism
• Chandra Sekhar Bhagavatula, Computer Science
• Nick Pizzolato, Computer Science

Faculty Advisers:

• Larry Birnbaum, Computer Science
• Jeremy Gilbert, Journalism
• Kristian Hammond, Computer Science

Working with my chapter co-author, Matt Mansfield, I documented the media consumers experience of interacting with visual media. The book, edited by Medill professors Abe Peck and Edward C. Malthouse tries to explain the relationship between content creators and their audience. Pre-order your copy today.

Medill on Media Engagement illuminates how content creators can systematically provide engaging journalism for today’s empowered audiences. Drawing on nearly a decade of significant research at Northwestern University’s Media Management Center, 17 contributors analyze a lexicon of how people define their media experiences. They then offer best practices and case studies for how a dozen of these rich experiences – from Civic to Timeout, Inspiration to Community-Connection– can make today’s media brands relevant and important.