TimeShift is a unique, interactive storytelling platform that lets users explore how current events are connected to their past. It’s designed for people who want to understand the context and history behind breaking news, but often struggle to find the relevant information. By visualizing the relationships between past events and current news, TimeShift helps users develop a deeper understanding of the complex, long-term consequences of global issues.

The platform uses a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning algorithms to analyze news archives and identify relevant connections between past and present events. Users can select a current news story and then “rewind” to explore the relevant past events, using an interactive timeline to navigate the relationships between them. Each past event is presented as a short, interactive story, complete with images, videos, and audio clips to bring the history to life.

NewsPuzzle is an interactive, multimedia storytelling experience that helps readers understand the underlying connections and context of the news. Each day, a new puzzle is released, featuring a central theme or story that branches out into multiple interconnected narratives. Readers can explore these narratives through a combination of immersive audio, video, and interactive graphics. The twist? Each narrative is presented in a cryptic, incomplete form, requiring readers to fill in the gaps by searching for related news articles, social media posts, or expert opinions.

ArchiveLens is a lightweight local tool that turns a journalist’s or content creator’s scattered archive of text files into a searchable wiki that runs in their own browser. Every five minutes, it scans a chosen folder, such as a Nextcloud directory, and automatically converts new or changed documents from the Open Document Format (ODT) into Markdown. It then presents all content in a clean wiki interface, organized by folder and showing each file name together with its date, so users can instantly see how current a piece of content is. Its full-text search makes it easy to find a specific quote, figure or passage in seconds, and it is considerably faster than the built-in search of any operating system. ArchiveLens is particularly suitable for freelance journalists, writers and small editorial teams with large archives that have grown over many years. Because everything runs locally, no cloud service or account is required. To test ArchiveLens, we can set it up for a small group of freelance journalists and ask them to track how quickly they find quotes and background material compared with their usual search methods.