Mary Nahorniak: Good morning everyone, I'm so glad to be here with you today. Thank you for joining me on this Friday morning at the end of a really exciting week of ONA. I'm excited to show you a bunch of new Google tools for journalists that I hope you'll be able to walk out of here today with something you want to try, something new to think about, some actionable steps for you. So I know there's some familiar faces and current and former colleagues in the chat so glad to see you guys today. Don't worry too much about trying to keep every URL as we go. My colleague Megan Chan is going to drop some in the chat as we go along and I'll call out some of the important ones as we do this. A little bit about me and a little bit about Google News Lab. I'm Mary Nahorniak. I'm the U.S. teaching fellow for Google News Lab, which is part of the Google News Initiative. There are about a dozen or so teaching fellows like me around the globe. And our role is simply to train journalists on digital tools and help you do your jobs better. So if that's something that you'd like more of for your newsroom, you can email me, you can email our group and I'll share all of that contact information at the end. I've been with Google News Lab for about two and a half months. Before this I was with USA Today for about a decade leading the audience team, a 24/7 digital team focused on sharing some of our best work with audiences around the U.S. And I've also been the breaking news director at the Baltimore Sun. I've worked at a news literacy nonprofit called NewsTrust and I spent a year in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, doing product for a mobile internet company. So all that to say, let's dig in. The Google News initiative is Google's effort to build a stronger future for journalism. I know many of you are familiar with it already, and do have some close partnerships with us. My role focuses on the first of the three E's here, which is to elevate and strengthen quality journalism. The other areas of focus for the GNI are evolving business models through programs like Subscribe with Google, and empowering news organizations through innovation. That's mainly achieved through our regional innovation grants as well as our development of tools for journalists, which is what we're going to talk about today. If you save one URL today, save this one -- g.co/newstraining. This is our site where you can follow along with everything I'll show you today in addition to dozens of other tools. So most people and, I'm one of them, are experiential learners. So you've been talked to a lot this week at the conference. And so, while I hope to inspire you to want to do some training, this is where you can do that and get really hands on with the tools, walk through them step by step and get to playing around and experiencing them for yourself. So that's our training site, and feel free to share that with your newsrooms and colleagues as well. Our agenda for today is pretty packed we have a little under 45 minutes. The first thing we're going to talk about is advanced search. I'm going to show you a new tool called Pinpoint that I'm really excited about. We're gonna look at Google Earth time lapse, which is Earthʻs newest feature. And then at the very end we'll connect that with a collaboration tool that I really liked called Jam Board. So for advanced search, if you've had a Google News Lab training, you have been through some of our search modifier work. I'm going to skip that today and get right to some of our specialized search engines, but there are I believe 42 search modifiers and Megan's got a URL to drop in the chat with you all so that you're searching can be more targeted more precise and maybe uncover some new things that we haven't found yet. As far as specialized search engines go, the first one I want to show you is Google Scholar so this is our search engine that will uncover academic articles and case law. And so the first thing I want to just move over and demo for you is what that looks like and what it's used for for journalists. So, a couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation to the Association of Health Care Journalists and there was somebody who was working on a story, or I think several stories around rural cancer care and how cancer care differs, and how outcomes differ in rural areas versus urban areas. So I really like that just as a specific use case so I'm going to dive into that here. And as I search for rural cancer care you can see that Google is doing what you're used to doing, which is making suggestions. And in this case I'm going to click through and so what I have here, because I'm searching academic papers, are exactly what that is. So what I like this for, of course, is you can read the studies, but you can also quickly get to some, perhaps, new sources, diversity of sources. If you if you or your newsroom are often going to the same folks this is a great way to find some new names. And then the papers, of course, have the information contained and then many of them also reference other studies as well. So again this sort of gets you under that initial layer of Google searching which is searching the whole web. And this lets you get really specific. And if I go back to the Google Scholar page you can also search case law. You can search federal courts or in my case, I live in California now, and so I've got California selected, and you can sort of dive into the court system that you're searching through, and then look for the law on that topic. So I really like this one as well. Just a little bit easier way to get through it and using a Google search interface that you're used to and the results being returned in a way that we're all sort of used to seeing at this point.
The next one I want to show you is data set search. And so this one is going to help you get through, again, some of that noise of the web and get to just data sets. If you're looking for give me the raw information on this topic this is where you can do that. It makes a couple of suggestions for you which you can, of course, click through. I'm going to stick with our cancer care question. And I get, as I get through rural cancer, I get these three sorts of studies, so I'm just going to click on one of them. And this will take you to the page that explains where the data set is. So in this case it's on Statista and I'm going to click through and get to the page where that information is hosted. And from here and every site will be different, where the data set actually lives, which you can get to a downloadable version of that. So if I download the Excel file, I can very quickly then re upload it into Google Sheets clean up the data, maybe publish it into a flourish visualization or a table and just start looking at what I have to work with. So I really like data set search for getting at some of that information that can help you get more granular with the reporting work that you're doing. And there is a precursor to data set search, which is google.com/publicdata/directory. So let's go there. And what this allows you to do is sort of click through a bunch of data providers, and I'm not going to do that today but I just want to show it to you and as you get into to the data and sort of mixing and matching what's out there. So there's U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau has some data in here for the U.S. You can then create a graph of what you're looking at, and you can then make that graphic embeddable. So once you actually get to the page where you've built a graphic, you can grab that embed code and import it into one of your stories. So, that can be useful for exploration. This is also very cool -- The Common Knowledge Project. So let's go to this one. And so this I also think is great for exploring, so we're going to click into build a chart. Sorry, we're going to explore. So, this is a town near where I live, Mill Valley, California, and so it's showing me just here is a bunch of information around this place. And so you can start to explore demographic makeup, there are a lot of tabs here at the top so like what are health outcomes. If I X out this specific location, it's just starting to make some recommendations -- are you interested in this information? Are you interested in this information? What you can then do is add these charts to your own set of charts. And so I'm going to go up here into the upper right, if it will let me. And don't think that one's going to work today. Frozen. So my chart is a page of, as you sort of go through exploring what's in there, you can add them to your page of charts and go starts to see here's all this information I'm aggregating around something, around someplace, around a certain set of information, and all of those charts, here are some, are embeddable. So let's see if we can get into one here.
Here we go. So on this particular chart so this is the percentage of people who had an annual checkup and the data is from the years 2015 to 2018. You can easily share this chart on social. And you can also grab the embed code, which I know you all are familiar with, pick up the iframe and drop it into your story. So again, sort of exploring data and then finding a way to bring it into your story are two really important ways to use these tools. And then this one is relatively new and I love this one, this is our Fact Check Explorer. And so I want to show it to you. So what this does is it will only showcase fact checks and how Google knows that something is a fact check is if that site has already been approved to be in Google News and we know that it's a news site, a news publisher. And then if you are interested in having your fact-checking work show up here, you can visit Fact Check Tools and click on Markup Tool, and learn just how to structure your story so that they show up as a fact check, and this may be something that you do all the time or maybe something that you do occasionally. I'm sure many of you have noticed and I've noticed over the last 15 to 20 years, the sort of change in how we think about fact checks from if something isn't true, it isn't a story. We used to be a way of thinking, and some of the discussion I would hear in my newsrooms, to now we just know how much misinformation is out there, and I think a lot of journalists now sort of think about correcting that information as one of our responsibilities, and certainly as an opportunity. So if that's something that you do, you can have your work included in here. And so in this case, the first thing you could do is just click recent fact checks. And so you can see that Google is sorting by recency. You can change the language. And what I'm going to do is search for California, because as I mentioned I recently moved here, and so as I just started digging it, I wanted to see what kind of rumors were there about California and then, of course, what was true and what wasn't. So this one is brand new, from AFP, they have a robust fact-checking organization. So California told everyone not to charge their electric cars. Turns out that's false, the kind of thing that we hear from celebrities who might be running for governor in California. So Caitlyn Jenner said 50% of all homeless people live in California, which is certainly the kind of thing that, when you hear that as a journalist, you thought, "Is that right"? And it turns out that is not exactly true. And so, I personally loved this one but there was a rumor that Disneyland had banned screaming on its rides. So you all remember last year that an amusement park in Japan said, "Please, just scream inside your heart," the meme of 2020. And Disneyland did not say that. Disneyland is open again and so if you do go, you can scream as loud as you want to. So I love that one. Oh, we have an interesting question. So to go back a couple. Somebody is asking with data set search, is there a way to filter by whether the data is open access. I don't believe so, but that's a great question. So thank you for that one. Statista is one of the ones that you do need to log into to have access to. A lot of them are publicly hosted as well and do come from government sites. So I think it just takes a little bit of digging around. Cool. So that's Fact Check Explorer. Please scream inside your heart. The next thing I want to just move to -- so those are our specialized search engines. Those are some of our advanced search work. I hope you will explore what's out there and see what kind of stories there are for you. And I want to show you guys now Pinpoint, which I mentioned at the beginning. It used to be called Backlight, if that sounds familiar. And so Pinpoint is our tool that lets you upload a large collection of documents and then explore and analyze what you have. So one of the key use cases would be I've now got a bunch of documents. Maybe they're from a FOIA request, maybe they're just from some research work that you did. You can upload them into Pinpoint and Pinpoint is going to very quickly help you understand what you have and then allow you to search through it. So I'll show you kind of what that looks like. We'll do a live demo after I walk you through some of that stuff. One of the most important things to know about it is it's part of our Journalists Studio set of tools. So you'll see some familiar friends here. We just talked about the Common Knowledge Project in Fact Check Explorer. Flourish is a tool I mentioned that is free for journalists to use for data visualizations. Google Trends, of course, which you're all familiar with. So Pinpoint was developed with reporters specifically in mind and with feedback from the industry and alongside the industry throughout. So if it is something that you're going to use and I hope that you will, we would love your feedback and love your thoughts as you go.
And so again, it uses some of the best of Google's search technology, machine learning and AI to help you analyze and work through a set of documents to help you figure out what's the story here. I'd want to call out these file types so I've mentioned documents a bunch, which of course, my brain certainly goes to PDFs and Word documents and email file types are accessible here as well, but I want to also call out a use case that many journalists find really helpful, which is the audio. And so if you upload an audio file, like an mp3 or a dot wav, Pinpoint is going to quickly transcribe that audio for you and share it into a PDF, and so you can then search through the audio that you have. So one of the, you know, use cases that I hope your brain quickly went to was if you're doing an interview, maybe you're doing it on Zoom or you're doing it on the phone or even if you're just using the voice memos on your phone, you can upload that audio into Pinpoint and get a transcript of your work. This is a good time to mention that this tool is totally free. It's, as I said, developed for journalists meant for journalists and free for journalists to use. So I know there are some paid tools out there that people like for transcription and Pinpoint can do that for you. And when we go into the live demo I'll show you what that looks like. So. We love that capability. Once you upload documents into Pinpoint, you will see what we call entities. So this is essentially saying these are the people, organizations and locations that show up most often in your documents. So one use case that I've just thought about is the FOIA request for Anthony Fauciʻs emails. And so that's one of those things where you don't know what you're going to get, right? But there's going to be some interesting stuff in there and you know there are going to be some stories. But who did he email the most, what phrases that he uses the most, any locations mentioned specifically where they focused on where COVID was having worst outbreaks, that sort of thing. So Pinpoint is going to help you to start to see what do you have here. And then you can also share your collection documents with collaborators so fellow reporters your editor, and everybody can work off of the same set of documents. So I think it's also important to say this and I'll explain it again as needed in the live demo, but you can't share these documents publicly through Pinpoint, So this isn't meant to be a tool where you upload a document and then you can embed it in a story like you might do with Scribd or Document Cloud. This is simply for your own reporting purposes. So anything you upload in there is private to you, unless you choose to share it with others, and you would do that in this way, kind of the way that you are used to sharing Google Docs, that sort of thing. So, that said, let me show you Pinpoint. You can sign up for it at g.co/pinpoint and the team that works on it are based in Tel Aviv. One of my product colleagues is on this call, so if we have questions for him he can join us, and they have an internal goal of getting to record requests for access within about 24 hours. You've all told me they often do it much faster than that so if this is something you're interested in, you should be using it in a matter of hours or days. And so this is what Pinpoint looks like as you get started. So I'm going to go into -- there two things I'll just point out initially. So up here is my workspace files that I've either uploaded or that have been shared with me. And then what you would also see is this explore area. And so these are publicly accessible collections of documents. These are public documents. You can see the Mueller report is in here. I'm just going to scroll down a little bit. There are a number of FBI files from Ronald Reagan, from Martin Luther King,. So there are stories inside these collections of documents. And so this is where it gets a little tricky but as I mentioned the files that you upload are always private. These are public through partnerships with these organizations. So it's not something that you would ever do with the documents that you're sharing. Somebody asked the question about languages, which is great. I'll show you that next. So up here in the upper right in settings, there are two places to change your language setting. One is for the entities displayed so I'll show you the entities but that's where Pinpoint is showing you here's sort of what you have right. So we have a number of languages that it supports. And then we also have language support on audio files. So that means if you'd conducted an interview in Spanish, you change your language to Spanish, the transcription that you get back will also be in Spanish. So there is multiple language support, which can be really helpful.
That said, let's go into the set of documents that has been shared with me these are NASA documents from the Apollo missions. So the first thing I'll note is we have about 1,300 documents in here, Pinpoint is really fast. So I heard of somebody uploading 30,000 documents. They were done being processed in 15 minutes. It's wicked fast, it's getting faster all the time. So, you also will have here names of people you would expect to see inside of Apollo documents, astronauts that we're familiar with. The most frequently named organization is NASA. And then we also have locations and I just love this because you've got Houston, you've got Earth. You've got Kennedy Space Center, etc., etc. So this is Pinpoint just starting to say these things show up the most in your set of documents. If we were to click on one like NASA, it's going to bring up all of the documents that either NASA or the fully spelled out name of the agency is going to show up in. And so I'm gonna do a little bit of searching through these documents to show you how the search works. And so one of the first things that I want to show you is synonym search, which I just sort of referenced. So if I search for the word "moon," which you would expect to find, we get 350 results, and so Pinpoint is finding the word moon, of course, but in this case I'm just going to bring this up more in the top of the screen, it's also bringing up the word "lunar." Essentially, Pinpoint is saying if you're interested in moon we're pretty sure you'll be interested in this document too because it contains references to moon and words like moon. So synonym search is really helpful. I have never seen this functionality in another product. If you have, I'd love to know, but I'm going to search for this phrase, which is going to bring me to this particular document. And so I've typed in the word "Loomis," which is the acting director of NASAʻs last name, and then I also searched for the word "state." And so what's happened is Pinpoint has found the word state -- you can see that it's written in cursive, it's sort of diagonal. And yet, Pinpoint can search through handwriting. So if you think about the use cases for political journalists on bills with margin notes, archival material. I've thought about like Hollywood scripts if they're scribbled on. So, again, you have a collection of documents, they've got a bunch of stuff on there, Pinpoint is going to help you find, oh, you're interested in this word or this type of thing? We think all of these things will be helpful for you. And so that's what that's helping you do. You can also search through photos for text inside a photo. So this doesn't search for photos that might contain an image of something if I search for giraffe, it's not going to bring up all the photos of giraffes. What it is going to do is, I've typed in this particular set of letters STDN, which I looked this up yesterday was the Spacecraft Tracking and Data Acquisition Network, part of NASA. So that is the thing that you're looking into in your set of documents, it's also going to pull up photos that include that text. So you can see, this is a little bit small probably for you all to see, but it's highlighted in green. STDN shows up inside this photo because it's on this person's desk. So I think that is really cool for -- I've also thought about kind of in this set of Apollo documents if there were a photo let's say of Neil Armstrong, and he had his name on his flightsuit, it would bring that up. You're interested in X, we're going to show you everything that we can find on that. And then the last one I want to show you is what the audio looks like. So I'm searching for this phrase that I know is going to bring up this PDF. So you can see up here in the file type that it was an mp3 and it's now been converted to PDF by Pinpoint. And so I searched for the phrase congratulate and Bob Coe, which is a name. And so here you can see the audio is broken out into timestamps, so you can quickly sort of scroll through what you have. And then it is finding those words. You then could take this, you can see like it needs a little bit of cleaning up, right? You would uppercase the B, that sort of thing, and share those quotes within your story. So it's a great way of helping you find -- I've got this big interview, I've got this audio file, where is it when we talked about this topic, right?, or what exactly was that quote that I remember was so good? You can quickly get to it, and then you can listen to the audio if you wanted to compare the transcription but you've got the basics right there, so it's helping you sort through it. Okay. So I want to also show you some real world examples of how Pinpoint has been used in reporting. Hopefully that gives you just a sense of what's possible sort of inside of Pinpoint.
So, the Center for Investigative Reporting used Pinpoint to search through thousands of pages of emails and records from health agencies around the country to report the story, which is part of an ongoing series about the spread of COVID and immigration detention centers. And this story in particular focused on testing. So if you imagine the documents that is uploaded and then you search for test or testing, you can quickly start to give shape to a story. The Boston Globe, a number of reporters got hundreds of documents in PDF format that were clunky and if you've ever gotten a four-year return where they're not photocopied well, they're upside down. This is where that sort of handwriting search, the sideways text, can be really helpful. The searchability there. So they found that search to be really useful in reporting the story on the police department, and they were even able to write a story on deadline once they got their documents because they were able to sort through them really quickly. The Post has been using Pinpoint for a while. They used to analyze the Mueller report, and they're now using it for material related to the Capitol riots. From January. So if you think about there's just a lot of data there are a lot of files around that day. And that is a story that touches a lot of different teams at the Post, right? It was in DC so it's local, but it's national, itʻs also political. A number of people can all work off the same set of documents. I love this story from the Sun, one of my former newsrooms. So the reporter searched through the collection that I showed you that was shared publicly of the FBI files on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And so he searched for the word Baltimore within that file set, and he was able to find a really interesting story that he connected for Martin Luther King Day in January. And then this is an example that I love -- so the reporter interviewed a number of dancers on the SAG-AFTRA contract, and took all of the audio from the all of those dancers uploaded it into Pinpoint and quickly got the transcripts to share, to be able to sort through some of that work so that's a great example of somebody using that audio capability to build their entire story. And then I think this example is so interesting. So this is a fact-checking outlet in Mexico, Verificado, and so what they did is they used Pinpoint to compare audio transcripts that the government released of what the president said, with recordings. So essentially, we have the audio file of what was said. And we have the document of what the government said was said, and then we can compare the two and look for discrepancies and look for stories in those. So I just think that is so interesting to be able to essentially do fact checking in real time, certainly gives you a competitive edge and brings a lot of information to people when that is still really newsworthy. And then finally from my former newsroom USA Today. This is a classic USA Today story where we would look into what is the state of X in all 50 states. And so, a number of reporters on the investigative team have been using Pinpoint for a while. And in this case they got documents from all 50 states and in order to just, I sure I talked to you about how Pinpoint can help you see what you have. They can also help you see what you don't have. We don't need these documents, the story is not here, right? And so start to kind of sift through what is important to help you tell the story and then what isn't part of the story, and set those aside. So here's where you can sign up -- g.co/pinpoint. If you have questions about the tool this is the email address to reach the team directly, although you can also do that through me, I know we've got a number of questions. So, let's see -- let me just catch up here on the chat. And why don't we bring in Yuval, who's in Tel Aviv. Yuval Shukroon will join us in just a minute here. Hello.
Yuval Shukroon: Hey, everybody. Good morning.
Mary Nahorniak: Hi Yuval.
Yuval Shukroon: Excited to be here.
Mary Nahorniak: Awsome. I'm really glad that you could join us.There's a question that I've not gotten this one before and I think this is really interesting. So, Lisa says, "Could this be used to conduct sentiment analysis in a collection of audio files?"
Yuval Shukroon: Right, so at this time we don't do any special visualization of keywords that may appear. However, we do provide you with the count of entities and search results. So assuming you know the list of words then you could do the sentiment analysis on top of the transcription, but we don't provide any sentiment analysis just yet within the product.
Mary Nahorniak: So, just to go back there are a couple of questions -- I talked about some of these, but they're important to be clear on. So somebody asked if you can share collections widely. So that's important to just note. You just share it with the collaborators that you choose, and you can't share them publicly. You all correct me if that's wrong or if there's something else important to know on that.
Yuval Shukroon: Correct. So at this time, and moving forward, whatever you create is by default, private, and you need to actively choose whom to share a collection with. However, as the product evolves, we are considering an option of sharing it with Pinpoint users, obviously, by choice and an opt in. But that's coming, further down in the in the product roadmap that we're working on, is having the ability to widely share with the community of Pinpoint users for others to benefit. But that's not yet available and our direction which we're considering with Pinpoint.
Mary Nahorniak: Cool. So that's a good time to mention again that we love feedback from journalists, and as we have ideas for how we want to evolve the product, we'd love to get your feedback on those things. So, that's great. So there's another question. This is a good one. So, with an audio file, does it transcribe quickly or does it have to essentially listen to it in real time, meaning if you have three hours of audio, is it going to take three hours to process and transcribe it?
Yuval Shukroon: Right. Definitely not real time transcription it's much faster than that. It's the advantages of machines, so yeah, definitely much faster than you would think, probably. I don't want to benchmark the system but faster than you think. Probably that's the right answer.
Mary Nahorniak: Okay, great, that's a good one. Thank you.
Yuval Shukroon: I've seen hours of audio in a few minutes. I mean transcribe so that's the paces we're looking at.
Mary Nahorniak: Yeah, great. So there's a big, good umbrella question, which is sort of what's in it for Google? What does Google do with the files? What's what, why build the tool? So I'll just answer sort of in the big picture. Helping journalists do their jobs better rolls up to Google's largest mission, which is around organizing and making the world's information accessible and, of course, we want that information to be great. We want it to come from great journalists doing their work. So developing tools for journalists, supporting journalism work is connected to that big umbrella mission of Google and so the Google News Initiative is Google's effort to help work on that and build those tools. So, as far as sort of what happens with the files, you want to talk about file security in sort of a broad sense? You've all, I thought, that one is always an important one that comes up with folks.
Yuval Shukroon: Sure, happy to. So, essentially, we do not access any files, we do not do any technical usage of the files. Everything remains completely private. We do not train models or whatever on the files that users upload into Pinpoint. It's a secured storage system. We follow the guidelines of any other Google service that you may have already been using like Google Docs, in terms of retention periods and ownership of files. We offer portability so you can always retrieve all of the files you've uploaded into Pinpoint. If you'd like to go and use them somewhere else. So essentially there's no use whatsoever of whatever files you upload for the benefit of Google or other users as well. It's just a secured collection of documents for your work.
Mary Nahorniak: Right. And I think one thing I also didn't share but it's important to note that of course we talked about uploading files. You can then delete files when you're done with them, whatever your personal preference will be for if you want to keep them in Pinpoint, if you're done working with them and you want to remove them, you can remove them. There's a question on what is the accuracy of the transcription. You want to talk about that, Yuval?
Yuval Shukroon: Sure, so we're using the most advanced transcription services that Google has to offer. All over accuracy obviously varies, both in terms of the languages that you choose to transcribe. English is a very qualitive, leading language. Some languages may have lower quality but, however, still usable. Also, it matters the types of the quality of the audio file tends to upload into Pinpoint. So if you have a very clear recording you've taken with professional recording equipment, obviously, quality precision be much, much higher than something you've may have captured with your mobile phone on a busy street. We've seen very good results in terms of accuracy. However, some inaccuracy may exist as in any other transcription tool you may be using today.
Mary Nahorniak: Okay, cool, thank you. So I think the headline is the transcription depends on the quality of the audio. English is very strong. The other languages are continuing to get better and then you always want to check the accuracy by going into your audio file. You also have those timestamps to help you do that more quickly, so great. That's all I see for questions right now. Thank you, Yuval. I really appreciate it. We have a little over 10 minutes left and so I'm going to move to our third and final tool that I want to show you guys today and switch gears and move to Timelapse. So let me move the slides forward, here we go. So Timelapse is the newest feature in Google Earth. It's the biggest update to Google Earth since 2017. This is a GIF of the Aral Sea, essentially drying up. And it is starting to be water being rediverted into it. But what Timelapse does is it shows you how has something changed over -- it's all of the photos began in 1984, so I believe it's 37 years. How has this piece of the earth changed? And so what that's meant to do is give us this new dimension of our planet. And that's the dimension of time. So there are 20 million satellite photos from the past 37 years that have been embedded into Google Earth, and it creates a seamless view of the planet over time and it's explorable as well. And so it's very cool. And I want to show you that because it's cool, but I think it's also helpful for reporting to just look at the area that you focus on covering. What has changed, what did this used to look like, what can we notice about development, deforestation, new roads that are built. Watching the glaciers melt is pretty devastating. And so I just think there are any number of -- climate change is one of the biggest stories of our time. Any number of stories that can be found through Timelapse. So these are just a couple of GIFs of what you can see. So starting in the upper left and around, we have development in Dubai, we have development in Las Vegas, you can actually see Lake Mead there on the upper right, drying up. It is at its lowest level since 1930s right now. You see the glacier, Columbia Glacier in Alaska, start to melt, and then there's deforestation in the Amazon. So, all of the photos have come from NASA, they've come from time and the U.S. Geospatial Agency. Before we actually go to Timelapse, I want to show you that there are 800 free, public, downloadable ready-to-use videos of some of those key places. And so I'm going to take you there first and then we're gonna switch to showing you Timelapse in real time. Then, I have an interactive exercise for you guys because I just can't help myself. So here are those video downloads, you can click to download any of these videos it's still loading here and I can sort by region. And I don't want to do that right now, but I can sort by North America if I like to, and you can just start to see so that places selected, all have something that has interestingly changed in the last 35 to 40 years. And so you can include those in the videos that you create for your site. So I really love that. And so let me just make sure so I'm going to, we're going to switch a screen share and my colleague Megan is going to call it Timelapse to show it to you guys before we do that. So I'll tell you how to get there because we're going to look at Timelapse through her screen and then I'm going to ask you all to visit it, if you're willing, and then join me on an interactive tool called Jamboard. And so that's a place where you can then show me what you saw in Timelapse. So just that's where we're going in the next few minutes, I will keep talking us through that as we go. So there are three ways to search Timelapse. You can search. So, this is a GIF of Timelapse itself so I'll show you the search bar is right here. And so you could just put in where you live or places you're interested in seeing. And then the Timelapse and Google Earth teams have built stories. So these are changing forests, fragile beauty warming planet, a bunch of ways of just looking at, here's, here are some important things to know about how our planet has changed. And then there are also featured locations. So that said, I'm going to stop my share. I'm going to let Megan share her screen. So just bear with us here. Alright, so this is Timelapse. If you all go to g.co/timelapse, you'll be able to go in here. So, Megan, If you want to kind of just scroll through the stories on the right that we were talking about, so changing forests and fragile beauty, you can see warming planet so, of course, glaciers and a number of other ways that showed up. Urban expansion is really interesting to watch. And then if you scroll back to the top and let's just go visit somewhere. So, what do you have in mind? Let's go check out something. Yeah, let's see that glacier.
And then, of course, you guys are used to seeing that sort of Google Earth kind of zooming you around. And it's doing that here on the left, it is a heavy processing website. So this is Glacier Point Road in Yosemite Valley, California, and you can see across the top is the time bar. And so as things change, you can start to see the years move through. And, yeah, let's look at that Columbia Glacier in Alaska.
We'll just give that a minute.
Yeah, I don't know if you all just, if your heart just sinks when you see that but it's hard to watch. And it's important to watch, right? And to sort of be able to see what's going on. So that's where I think the real value in a time lapse is, is just the starkness of how quickly and how much things are changing on our planet. Okay. Megan Thank you. I'm gonna go back to my share. When you're ready to stop yours, and then I will. Awesome. Going back to sharing. Great. Okay, so here's what I would like to ask you all to do, is go to Timelapse -- so g.co/timelapse in your browser, go explore something that you're interested in. Maybe it's where you live, maybe it's just something that you have a sense has changed and then join me on Jamboard and Megan's gonna put the link in the chat if she hasn't already, and then I'm going to call up our Jamboard and you can leave a sticky note of what you saw, where you visited and what you noticed. So we'll make this collaborative and just sort of see where people are exploring. So, if you're ready, go. Or maybe you've already got started and I'm going to go to that Jamboard link while you do that. I think the value of Timelapse is really in you being able to explore, explore through Google Earth, and then start to see what's changed. So let me work on getting my Jamboard link.
I see all of your little Google doc animals are showing up in there and that just -- we've got cheetahs and ducks and ferrets -- it's just great. So to leave a sticky note, if you haven't done this before -- I love this is. Itʻs just a way of sharing this collaboration tool with you as we all collaborate on this. I think this is really nice for remote teams, really nice for brainstorming. If you click on the sticky note feature on the left, it's below the big white arrow inside the black circle. You can click on sticky note, you can choose the color for your sticky note and you can leave one on this page. So I know I'm still talking while I asked you to do something but, so again, if you go to Timelapse explore something, and then come to this Jamboard and leave a sticky note of what you saw.
Hello, also share if you having trouble, sort of finding Timelapse -- again, it's g.co/timelapse. But if you get a little bit lost inside of Google Earth, on the left side, there's something called a ship's wheel, which is the Voyager, so I think it's the second item down on the left menu bar. You click on that and it's showing you sort of different places that you can go within Google Earth and if you scroll through that to get to Timelapse, then you'll be able to get to that place where you can do some searching. Alright, we've got some answers here so someone checked out Iowa and noticed that the landscape really transformed from green to dry and brown. Someone went to the Rocky Mountains and wasn't sure if they were seeing change over time or seasonal variations with snow coming and going, great question. So I think that's one of those ones that like leaves a question in your mind -- what am I seeing here? Is that a story, right? Someone explored Little Rock, Arkansas, where they live in work and said that they can see the development of the western part of the city really clearly. Someone traveled to their birthplace, Chennai in India, and found two big water sources shrink, expanding city of Hong Kong. Visiting the island where I grew up, I thought I might see more erosion, but the most notable change was in land use. Somebody went to deadly farms in South Charleston, West Virginia, in 1985. It was farmland. Now itʻs the biggest shopping area in the region with all kinds of big-box stores. Cool, guys these are awesome examples. Thank you for this. We are just about at time. So feel free to keep dropping your sticky notes in here because I love to see it. I'm just gonna go to the end of our slides here, and just share with you one, thank you for being here with me today. If you have a question. If you would like a training for your newsroom on any of these tools or anything else we have a number of trainings and I'd be happy to just explore those with you. You can email me. My last name is Nahorniak and that's my Google handles, Nahorniak@google.com. If you email newslabsupport@google.com, It goes to the broader team of teaching fellows and folks who work in Google News lab so that could be a question about a tool, a training, a partnership idea. If you want to collaborate with the Google Trends team on an experience, you could do that. I'll again share that news training site -- g.co/newstraining -- that's where all of the training is, and then a little bit more about the Google News initiative right at the bottom so we're at time thank you guys so much. What I'm going to do is, if I can get into the larger chat, I'm going to drop my feedback link. If you liked the session I would love your feedback. If you didn't like the session, I would love your feedback. Let me know what you thought and what you'd like to know more about, and then I'll join you guys in the breakout room if anybody has additional questions. So I think that's it. I'm gonna stop my screen share and again thank you all. Appreciate your time today.
