Bellingcat‘s Online Investigation Toolkit is freely available and periodically updated, and contains a multitude of resources for use in areas from online verification to ship and airplane tracking.
While founder Eliot Higgins previously told Interhacktives.com that “the work [they] do is not about journalism“, the methods and tools used by the open-source investigation collective can be of great value to digital journalists.
While the entire list is worth checking out, Interhacktives.com has been through and picked out five of the best resources for journalists from version 6.2 of the Toolkit, which was published on 30 October 2020.
A project led by the World Resources Institute (WRI), Resource Watch is a platform that provides visitors with large data sets and dashboards “on the state of the planet’s resources and citizens”.
Data on a range of topics from economic inequality to coral bleaching is freely available, with transparent details on methodology and sources also provided.
Some of these data sets are curated by Resource Watch into dashboards “on the major challenges facing human society and the planet”, painting coherent pictures of global issues like food production and water scarcity.
The platform is also used as the basis for a number of other apps and websites backed by the WRI, including LandMark — which provides information on the land rights of Indigenous Peoples across the world — and the Environmental Democracy Index.
DataBasic offers a number of “easy-to-use web tools” for people who are unfamiliar with working with large data sets.
WordCounter is a simple text analysis tool which allows you to spot common words and phrases in your work, while SameDiff compares multiple bodies of text for similarities and differences.
WTFcsv helps to simplify spreadsheets for less confident users, and ConnectTheDots analyses and visualises links between points in a given data set.
The guiding principle of DataBasic is a “focus on doing one thing well” at a time, which makes each of their tools simple but effective.
The website is available in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Danish.
TimelineJS gives journalists the ability to turn stories with “a strong chronological narrative” into an interactive timeline which can be embedded into a webpage.
The tool was built by the Knight Lab at Northwestern University, and — in addition to simple text and images — supports the embeds media from a variety of sources like Twitter, YouTube and Wikipedia.
(The Knight Lab has also built a similar free tool for storytelling with maps that is worth checking out: StoryMapJS.)
Twitter threads with multiple accounts in conversation can often become difficult to navigate, but Treeverse — available as a Chrome extension or Firefox add-on — is here to help.
Rather than the typical cascading single column of replies, the extension visualises a tweet and its responses as a tree: a square denotes each individual post, and lines between squares indicate that the lower tweet is a reply to the higher tweet.
The time between a pair of related tweets is also visualised: the colour of a line changes from red to blue as minutes pass, to give a quick indication of the speed of conversation.
OpenLinkProfiler is a tool that allows users to investigate the relationships between a given website and the other sites on the internet that link to it.
After entering a domain and clicking one button, you are sent to a dashboard summarising that site’s backlinks: the total number of links to the domain, the total number of unique domains that point to it and the quality of those links.
The dashboard also provides a strong filter function, enabling users to drill down more deeply into a site’s links.