StoryMapJS "is a free tool to help you tell stories on the web that highlight the locations of a series of events. It is a new tool, yet stable in our development environment, and it has a friendly authoring tool. StoryMap comes in two variants
- Classic: works with standard web maps - add a slide for each place in your story, add rich media -- images, videos, tweets, wikipedia pages, and much more. You can change the visual style of your map with a few presets, or you can use Mapbox to create your own style.
- Gigapixel: works with large photographs, works of art, historic maps, and other image files."
TimelineJS "is an open-source tool that enables anyone to build visually rich, interactive timelines. Beginners can create a timeline using nothing more than a Google spreadsheet, and pull in media from a variety of sources including Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Dailymotion, Google Maps, Wikipedia and more!. Experts can use their JSON skills to create custom installations, while keeping TimelineJS's core functionality."
Both of these free tools are from the Northwestern University Knight Lab ("a team of technologists and journalists working at advancing news media innovation through exploration and experimentation"), based at Evanston, Illinois. They seem
particularly useful for telling short stories.