November 19, 2010
Putting source documents online? DocumentCloud can enhance reporting, engagement
Reporters must read, analyze, and keep track of lots of documents—and increasingly it makes sense to share those documents with news audiences, to support the final story. If you’re posting documents online, why not do so in a way that adds value for both your reporting effort and your audience? DocumentCloud is a free tool that allows journalists to annotate, analyze, collaborate around, and publish source documents…
By Amy Gahran
DocumentCloud was developed with seed money from a 2009 Knight News Challenge grant. It creates a searchable public catalog of source documents—from FBI files, to government-commissioned reports, to medical records, to ballots and more.
When you upload a document to DocumentCloud, the system indexes all text in the document and also extracts text from images using optical character recognition. The system also has its own “scraper” that extracts and indexes all date references, so you can see all dates that appear in document and the sentence where each reference appears.
DocumentCloud also processes documents using semantic analysis tools from OpenCalais (a free service from Thompson Reuters). Once this is done, you can view in the sidebar a list of entities (people, organizations, place names, phone numbers, etc.) named in the document; or view a timeline based on dates listed in the document.
This can help reporters make a first pass at understanding the content and context of a document. And if you upload several related documents, this analysis can help you decide which documents you need to focus on first in your research.
“In terms of newsroom document analysis tools, we’re mostly competing with Post-it notes and highlighters,” observed DocumentCloud program director Amanda Hickman.
Hickman explained that DocumentCloud was designed specifically to support journalists and news organizations—so not just anyone can get an account. Account requests either must come from an editor at your news organization, or else the reporter who wants to use DocumentCloud must get an editor to send an e-mail to DocumentCloud confirming that they understand it involves adding documents to a public catalog.
“We don’t want reporters signing on to something editorial management isn’t interested in or doesn’t understand,” said Hickman.
So far about 150 news organizations are using DocumentCloud to help tell stories. For instance:
Hickman explained that reporters and editors get to choose when their source documents go public, so a reporter (or reporting team) can use DocumentCloud’s analysis features, make public and private annotations, etc. while they’re working on the story—and publish the document when the resulting story runs.
“We do require that eventually the documents you upload get made public through our system. We’re not going to be your private repository,” she clarified. “But we handle implementing that requirement case-by-case.” Currently about 9000 source documents have been uploaded to DocumentCloud, but Hickman says only about 2500 of these have so far been made public.
According to Hickman, DocumentCloud seems to get the most use, and the best results, in newsrooms where the online producers sit in the same area as the reporters and editors. “It’s hard to be creative with any new tool if your workflow has you shipping stuff upstairs or downstairs for the next step in the process,” she said.
DocumentCloud developers are working on tools to allow people to redact parts of pages, so you can avoid publishing information like a teenagers home address. The developers seek user suggestions for new features, and those suggestions directly guide future development of the system.
Are you looking for a good idea for this year’s Knight News Challenge? Hickman offers this suggestion:
“DocumentCloud is great for documents. It is a repository of primary source texts and a great set of semantic analysis tools for text. I’m consistently surprised, though, by folks who want to know how DocumentCloud handles video. Or spreadsheets. It doesn’t. I suppose you might want to annotate a spreadsheet. But rows and columns? Functionally, our software has no idea what those are. Same with pictures and sounds.
“You’d need a different name for your project, but I can tell you now that there are people looking for something like DocumentCloud for data and for video.”
thank you so much for this great informations !! good work
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knight foundation, engagement, tools, knight news challenge, analysis
Comments
By moviz, 11/23/10 at 4:34 pm
According to Hickman, DocumentCloud seems to get the most use, and the best results, in newsrooms where the online producers sit in the same area as the reporters and editors.
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By Samele, 01/13/11 at 8:31 pm
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