Visual essays are web pages created from annotated text files. The text files are formatted using Markdown, a lightweight markup language. The essay text can be annotated with simple tags that associate entities (people, locations, etc), images, maps, and videos with sections of text, typically paragraphs but can also be as small as a single word or as large as the entire essay. The visual essay tools add interactive visualizations to the rendered web page information contained in the tags.
Visual essays are especially well suited for story telling that uses maps, images, and videos. Adding a few simple tags to a text can result in an engaging web page that provides context and depth to the written text
The ability to easily associate text with maps and multimedia is useful but the real power in the visual essay approach used here is the ability to leverage open knowledge graphs such as Wikidata to obtain data that can be used for automatically generating information dialogs, location coordinates, image URLs, and other information about entities associated with a section of text. At present the visual essays can use entities from both the Wikidata and JSTOR knowledge graphs. Support for using other linked open data (LOD) sources may be provided in future versions.