Free data journalism tools - time lines

This post starts series of posts with free tools for data journalism. To make everything clear, I have nothing against paid apps but I just wanted to show that having strong willingness to work with data and no budget is enough to build a working place for a data journalist / yourself / data blogger / student / random person who likes data. In more romantic words, love for data is everything, you don't need more :)



Let's start with something easy, a few tools that can be used for creating time lines.

StoryMapJS 

It's a free and easy to use tool that helps in story telling. As a base for your story you can take a map or an image (a photograph, a work of art, an old map).

Check the examples:
- map: How the Islamic State is carving out a new country
- image: Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights

Game of Thrones done in StoryMapJS

TimelineJS 

It's an open-source tool that enables to build interactive time lines consisting images, films and text.

History of Moscow done in TimelineJS

Odyssey

It's an open source project developed by CartoDB and funded by the Knight Foundation. Map is a background for a story.

Odyssey offers three templates:
1. slides - display visualization chapters like slides in a presentation, here is an example => A shirt's journey.
2. scroll - create a visualization that changes as your reader moves through your narrative. The Guardian likes to tell such data stories. Example => The Voyage of the HMS Beagle.
3. torque - link story elements to moments in time. Example => from the project's website :)

A shirt's journey done in Odyssey

MapStory

It's an online social cartographic platform. Its goal is to empower the community to review data within a spatial and temporal framework.
It's like ManyEyes for chart makers, you can create map and get the code to embed the work on your website. Your work stays on MapStory website so others can learn from it and use it in their own projects.

Village Destruction in the Darfur Region, author: Everett Lasher, done in MapStory

Comparison of time lines tools

Tool	Embeding active links, images, videos	Story is based on	What do you need?	Can others generate code to embed your work?	Easy/difficult to learn	Author
StoryMapJS	yes	map, image	Google Drive	no	easy	Northwestern University knight lab
TimelineJS	yes	time line	Google spreadsheet	no	easy	Northwestern University knight lab
Odyssey	yes	map	Head and a story inside lol	no	Easy, but if you want to use more advanced options then you need to devote more time.	Developed by CartoDB and funded by the Knight Foundation
MapStory	yes	map	Data in CSV, shapefiles, rasters	yes	Easy to do simple things, for more advance it demands some knowledge of geo files. No reason to be afraid :)	MapStory Foundation