String Theory is a visual board for the people, places, events, and things at the heart of your project, and for the strings that tie them together. See the same case as a corkboard with strings, a timeline, a map, a stack of dossiers, a media gallery, or a sourced bibliography, and view them all at once on one screen or several.
String Theory is live and currently invite-only. Drop your email and we'll let you know when your invite is ready. No other email, ever.
Who is it for?
Nine people, nine kinds of project, and the same tool underneath every one of them. One of these is probably close to yours.
Maya—sophomore English teacher
Maya is tired of book reports that read like Wikipedia. Her students build boards of the Gatsby characters instead: the parties that shape them and the relationships that drive the tragedy, with images pinned and strings drawn between them. Each student presents their findings as a board the whole class explores together.
Tom—amateur sleuth
Tom’s desk is buried in books, printouts, and notes. His investigation now lives on a virtual corkboard, where every suspect, witness, scene, and date is pinned in one place with strings between whatever connects. For the first time he can see the whole case at once. When a new book lands, like William J. Mann’s Black Dahlia, it gets a board of its own.
Jess—true-crime podcaster
Jess co-hosts a true-crime podcast, and each episode takes months of research spread across documents, spreadsheets, and her photographer’s camera roll. String Theory pulls it all into one board the team works on together, with every photo and every claim traced back to where it came from. When the episode artwork is due, the screenshots are already waiting, and the show-notes bibliography has been assembling itself all along.
Sara—tabletop GM
Sara runs a Pathfinder campaign for five regulars, with more than twenty NPCs, three rival factions, a sprawling city, and a plot arc nobody can keep straight. At the table the Navigator sits on her laptop while two monitors face the players, one showing the board and one showing media. When she clicks Cailean MacLeod, the players watch the board swing to him, his dossier open, and his portrait come up.
Daniel—modern world history teacher
For the Chernobyl unit, Daniel’s students don’t just read about the disaster. They build it, one card at a time: the reactor team, the Soviet officials, the firefighters, the timeline of failures, and the cover-up that followed. By the end of the unit every student has a board showing how decisions, people, and events compounded into catastrophe.
Nadia—graphic novelist
Nadia is plotting a graphic novel with a cast of twenty, a decade of backstory, and a reveal that only lands if nobody learns the secret too early. String Theory holds the whole volume: the cast, the locations, and who knows what and when, so the continuity stays straight across every issue. The same board would work for a screenplay, a series bible, or a trilogy.
Priya—book club host
Priya hosts a book club working through a long Russian novel, and half the group has lost track of who is who by chapter twelve. One board of the cast and their tangled relations, published as a read-only link, fixes that. Members explore it from the couch without knocking anything loose, and Thursday starts with the argument instead of the recap.
Kai—superfan and archivist
Kai has followed the same band since the first EP. String Theory holds the whole story, with boards for the early years, the band members, the collaborators, and every tour, festival, and late-night TV spot. The media gallery fills up with clips, set lists, and photos, every one of them sourced. Then Kai publishes it, and the rest of the fandom finally has somewhere to look.
The Reyes family—murder-mystery night
Every other Friday a murder-mystery box arrives, and the family spends the evening figuring it out together. Each person pins a suspect, drops in clues as they find them, and argues about who did it, while the strings between alibis and motives draw themselves as the case unfolds.
How does it work?
Some people think in timelines, some see relationships, and some hunt for clues in the photos. String Theory gives you six ways to look at the same case and lets you watch them side by side.
On a single laptop, the views are one click apart. Open more windows and you can arrange them across two monitors, three, or however many you've got, or throw the String Board up on a classroom display or a podcast studio wall. The views stay in sync wherever they are. When someone clicks a suspect in the Navigator, the timeline jumps to where they appear, the String Board zooms to them, the Dossier swaps to their case file, and the Media gallery surfaces their photos. The same case, six ways, watched together.
Every screenshot below is the same board: the Black Dahlia case.
This is the literal corkboard, with photos pinned and string between everything that connects. Drag cards around, color-code the strings, stamp a card as ruled out or worth a second look, and pin sticky notes and masking-tape headings. Each board chooses which cards are on its wall at all.
The view for when you want to feel the case.
A dashboard with the timeline, the map, the cast, and the inventory all visible at once. Click anyone and the timeline highlights when they appear, the map shows where they’ve been, and their objects light up. The map is a real street map you pin places onto by coordinates, or you can swap it for an image of your own, such as a floor plan, a hand-drawn world, or a scene.
The view for when you want the whole case in one frame.
The case as a story, read top to bottom, with every event in order and the people, places, and objects tied to it. The Timeline spots the big gaps and offers them as eras, keeps whatever precision your source supports, and will run itself as a slideshow when you’re presenting. A project that isn’t on the Gregorian calendar can count time its own way instead.
The view for when you want to know when, and what came right after.
Read deep on the people, places, and things at the center of your case. Attributes, relationships, notes, media, and documents are laid out as a case file. Open four or six side by side, pin the ones you’re comparing, and widen the one that matters.
The view for when you need to actually understand someone, and notice the detail in their background that nobody else saw.
The evidence room: photos, video, audio, documents, and links. Filter by kind, search by tag, or group by the entity each piece belongs to. Paste a YouTube link or a podcast episode and it just works, and you can bookmark the moment in a clip that matters and tie it to a card.
Often where the real answer is hiding.
The bibliography, writing itself as you work. Every source you’ve cited is grouped by type, with a readable citation line and a count of how much of your evidence leans on it. There is nothing to assemble at the end, because it’s a by-product of filing things properly along the way.
The view for when someone asks how you know that.
Sometimes the answer is in the timing.
Sometimes it's in who knew whom.
Sometimes it's hiding in the photos.
Different people think different ways. String Theory respects that.
The classroom
Mr. Patel projects the String Board on the classroom display while his tenth-graders sit at their laptops, each in the Dossier view, reading character files closely and taking their own notes. When a student notices a connection no one else has seen, they call it out, and the whole room watches the new string draw itself across the big screen.
The podcast team
Jess's true-crime podcast team works around three monitors: the Navigator on the left for the timeline, the String Board in the middle for who knew whom, and the Media gallery on the right pulling up whichever photo or audio clip they're talking about. Click any name and all three monitors follow.
More than one wall.
Each board chooses which cards it shows, so a wall carries only what it needs. There are two reasons to build a second one, and the same project can do both.
When one corner of the board gets crowded, give it a wall of its own. Any card can open onto a breakout board: link "The Hodel theory" or "The tavern" to one and the card grows a small chevron. Click it and you're through, digging into that thread on a wall where it has room to breathe. On a fan board, the band gets a board; on a campaign, the city does; on a case, the suspect nobody can rule out.
Sometimes the second wall is not a closer look but a different question. The Great Gatsby project has a Character Web that lays the cast out as the novel's own map, the two Eggs and the Valley of Ashes with the strings of who wants and who betrays whom. Its second board, Themes & Evidence, holds the same book from the other side: the themes and essential questions across the top, the cited passages beneath, and the plot as Freytag's arc along the bottom.
Nothing was entered twice. The characters and the passages are the same cards, and each board shows the ones its question needs.
As simple as you want, as deep as you need.
If you're just dropping in some people and how they connect, you don't need to learn a schema. Every card has a name, a photo, a caption, and notes. That is enough to get a board started, and it's all most boards ever need.
When you're working on something you take seriously, pick a domain template and get a full set of fields and connection types already curated for your kind of work. Crime brings confidence ratings, alibis and motives, and suspects and witnesses. Musical Artist brings albums, tours, and festival sets. History, Story, Literary Analysis, and TTRPG Campaign each bring their own, or you can stay on Standard, which fits any subject and is where every new project starts. Journalism and Biography are on the way.
If the template didn't anticipate something, add your own fields and turn off the ones you don't use. Coin a new kind of relationship and it's there for the whole project. The product grows with the project rather than the other way around.
Make it look like yours.
There are two knobs here, and they're separate. A template decides what the cards ask, such as whether a card wants an alibi or a set list and whether a string can foreshadow or contradict. A skin decides what the board looks like: kraft paper and red yarn, aged vellum and wax seals, or a clean white card on a photograph of a stage. Mix them however you like and change either one later, because none of it touches your data.
Crime Noir
Kraft paper, cork, typewriter type, and red string: the squad room in 1947.
Musical Artist Vanilla
Clean cards on a stage, with green strings for performances and purple for collaborators. The color is the relationship.
Story Vanilla
A cast on a beach, with solid strings for what is and dashed strings for what only might be.
TTRPG Campaign Parchment
Vellum cards on an old map, and a calendar that runs on the campaign’s years rather than ours.
Literary Analysis Jazz Age
Champagne cards over a lawn party at dusk. Red strings for the plot, dashed blue for the foils, and a Basis on every claim.
Two more ship today: Standard (the default, which fits any subject) and History. Their pages are coming once their demo boards exist, and Journalism and Biography templates are planned.
Every project can have its own look. Pick a preset, twist the colors, and change your mind on a Tuesday. If the kids want neon for murder-mystery night, that's a project too.
Extras
Notes come in five papers or any color you like. Stamp a card with an ✕ for ruled out, a ? for suspicious, or a ! for important. The colors carry meaning, and you decide what it is.
Masking-tape headings label a section of the board. Props such as a camera, a banner, or a shield can be dragged in from your image library and tucked behind the cards.
A string can say exactly what the relationship was, why it matters, when it started and what began it, and when it ended and what ended it. Hover over it and it tells you. Mark it as over and the verb reads in the past tense everywhere.
Click a string and a small bar appears with everything about it: the kind, whether it’s over, which way it points, a color, and a line style. There is no dialog and no round trip, so you change it and keep moving.
Credit, source, date, license, and a link back to where it came from. Fill them in once and they travel with the picture, including onto the page you share.
Paste a YouTube video, a podcast episode, or a news article, and the thumbnail and title come along on their own. Bookmark the moment in a clip that matters and tie it to a card.
“Spring 1656” sorts after “Winter 1650” because you said so. Give the unit its own name, whether that’s AV, Stardate, or Third Age, and set where the story starts. Everything before that point folds into a backstory band.
A character brief, a session recap, or a summary of a source can be written in the app and kept with the card it belongs to, where anyone you share the board with can read it.
A camera button on the board saves the entire wall rather than the part on screen, at screen, print, or poster size, and it tells you the pixel count and the print inches before you click. Pick PNG for the print shop, or WebP for a file a fraction of the size.
Drop a place onto a street map by its coordinates, or swap the basemap for an image you upload, such as a floor plan, a hand-drawn world, or a period map of the city, and pin onto that instead.
Better together.
The string board isn't only a visual metaphor. It's a social one, because when two people work on the same case, you see each other on the board. Drag a string while they're watching and they see it draw across their screen. Drop a sticky note for them to find when they sign in. Argue about who did it.
That could be a family on murder-mystery night, a podcast team prepping an episode, a classroom working through a novel, or a GM and their players exploring a campaign world between sessions. String Theory is built around the idea that the best research is the kind you do with someone.
Show your work.
Plans & pricing
String Theory is in invite-only early access, and early access is free. These are the prices that take effect at public launch. Early users will never be charged without opting in.
Everything you need to build and share a real case.
$0 forever
For one serious researcher with a lot of projects.
$9 per month
or $90/year (two months free)
For the podcast team, the family, the co-GMs.
$7 per seat / month
2-seat minimum ($14/mo), up to 6 seats
Teachers: a Classroom plan (about $99/year per classroom, students included) is planned. Get in touch if that’s you.
Machine-readable pricing (for AI agents)
About
I'm Cory: a developer by trade, an English Literature graduate, a serious history buff, a tabletop RPG player, and a true-crime enthusiast. Pretty much everything I do for fun involves the same thing, which is tracking people, places, events, and how they all connect, whether that's mapping a novel's characters, prepping a campaign, untangling the Chernobyl disaster, or following a cold case.
The existing tools are either locked to one specific domain or feel like work. I wanted one that worked for all of them and felt like play. So I'm building it.
And using it. One of my own boards maps out a whole volume of a graphic novel I'm planning: the cast, the locations, who knows what and when. It's the best test I have. If the tool can't hold that together, it isn't finished.
We're personally provisioning a small number of early accounts for teachers, podcasters, GMs, journalists, researchers, and sleuths who'd genuinely use it, in exchange for honest feedback and, eventually, a public mention. There's no payment and no obligation either way.