As a reporter at The Washington Post, Sarah Cohen was frequently frustrated with the dearth of tools for working with chronological data.
Now the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, Cohen looks for ways to help journalists be more efficient.
TimeFlow, a free and open-source data analysis tool, is the first version (still alpha) of a project that she has been working on to make it easier for reporters to look at data over periods of time. Unlike some of the alternatives, such as the
SIMILE Timeline and
Dipity, TimeFlow is not built to present the data online.
Cohen worked with programmers
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg (who previously worked on
Many Eyes and are now at Google) to describe what features the tool would need.
Read on to see how journalists can use this tool.
