 Good morning, everyone. Today I'm going to talk to you about Fold. This is a project that I worked on in Ethan's future news class with Kevin Hu, who is a student in the MIT Media Lab group called Macro Connections. So they do a lot of work with creating interactive visualizations for complex data sets. So Kevin and I worked together on this project, and we're pushing it forward beyond the class. I wanted to tell you guys about it. So Kevin and I like to consider ourselves news junkies, but we got to talking and realized there's lots of kind of stories. We avoid reading because we lack the background to understand them, and we figure we're not the only ones with this problem. So I mean, imagine reading about the 2008 housing crisis without knowing what a mortgage is, or the 2014 crime and crisis without knowing where crime is, or even the discovery of Higgs Boson without knowing who this Higgs Boson guy even is. So I mean, there's lots of places you can go to try and find this background information, but chances are you'll either get lost very soon after starting to read it and just close that tab, never to return, or you'll start clicking links and get lost very quickly, very far away from the story you started with. So whether the context is definitional, historical, or technical, if you lack it, you feel stupid and you might just disengage with the story altogether, which is a problem that we wanted to solve. So we become obsessed with this question, how do you tell a complex story? So my background is in human-centered design and interaction design, so I like to think about how to build products that people actually want to use, that speak to their human motivations and desires. And Kevin, as I mentioned, his background is in data visualization, so he likes to think about how to use the limited real estate of your screen to convey the most information and the information that's important to you. So Fold is, we considered a new way to tell stories by combining context with structure. So for readers, that looks like a vertical axis for scaffolding and chunking a story. And each portion of the vertical axis has a horizontal axis that provides some context provided by the storyteller, which may be a journalist or maybe somebody, just a blogger or any other kind of storyteller. And for storytellers, that provides a modular structure that's appropriate for some kinds of stories, particularly chronological, event-driven, or stories that might require a lot of multimedia content to really understand. So I don't have time to go through the live demo with you today, but if you want to see it, I can show you afterwards. But this is just what the authoring platform looks like, and each piece of this is editable, so you can click right into the title and start typing your content there. So the white blocks, if you click on the plus sign here, you can add new elements to the chronological story. And then the plus button here in gray, you can add new context elements to that bar right there. So that might be a photo or an animated gif or a YouTube video, audio, or a map. And these are, here's a story that someone has written, has written a little bit. So the left and right hand buttons on the top allow the reader to scroll through that context bar, and there's a context bar associated with each block of the story. So Kevin and I have been thinking a lot about how to scaffold context creation because we recognize that storytellers have the best of intentions to educate their readership, but it's often, they may not have the time to do so. So we're trying to think of ways to pull from sources of content and context that exist elsewhere. So the YouTube API and other services. So our mission is twofold. I can't help but make that joke every time. You wanna help storytellers make their work more accessible to a general audience, and we wanna help readers better understand a story they might otherwise have disengaged with because it made them feel stupid. So we're hoping to launch for open beta at the end of summer and we would love it if lots of you folks in this room would be interested in participating and checking it out. So if you're interested, head to fold.media.mit.edu to sign up for our mailing list and we can let you know when we launch, or come find me sometime today and I'd love to talk about any of these ideas. Thanks.