Tip: view the speaker notes!
This is a slightly souped up version of the demo of DocumentCloud that I gave to the PBS NAPA folks at ONA last Thursday. I rolled in some great examples of our analysis tools from Jeremy's portion of our Friday panel.
Tip: view the speaker notes!
27. 13WMAZ News, ACLU National Security Project, Albany Times-Union, AnnArbor.com, Arizona Republic,
Asbury Park Press, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Better Government Association, Borderzine, Boston Globe,
Boston Review, California Watch, CBC News, Center for Investigative Reporting, Center for Public Integrity,
Centre for Investigative Journalism, City University London, Chicago Public Radio, Chicago Tribune,
Cincinnati Enquirer, Circle of Blue, Columbia Daily Tribune, Columbia Missourian, Commercial Appeal,
Connecticut Post, Dallas Morning News, Danbury News-Times, Dark Acres, Dart Center for Journalism &
Trauma, Democrat and Chronicle, Des Moines Register, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, El Paso Times,
Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fire Dog Lake, Foodless, Forbes, Fort Collins Coloradoan, Frontline, Gapers
Block, Gotham Gazette, Great Falls Tribune, Greenwich Time, Hearst Papers, Help Me Investigate,
Huffington Post Investigative Fund, Investigate West, Investigative Reporting Workshop at American
University, JURIST, KRCG 13, Las Vegas Sun, LinkTV, Living on Earth, Los Angeles Times, McClatchy
Washington Bureau, Media Coop, Miami Herald, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Minnesota Public Radio News,
MinnPost, Montana Watchdog, Mother Jones, msnbc.com, Muck Rock, National Public Radio, National
Security Archive, National Security Journalism Initiative (Medill), New York Times, News Northwest,
NewsHour, Oakland Local, Oakland North (UC Berkley), Omaha World-Herald, OpenCRS, OpenFile, Ottawa
Citizen, Ozarks News, Phawker, Pioneer Press, Pioneer Press/Sun-Times Media, Pittsburg Post-Gazette,
Politico.ie, Politifact, Press & Sun-Bulletin, ProPublica, Public Insight Journalism, Public Radio
International, Reference Tone, Reno Gazette Journal, Reprieve, Sacramento Bee, San Diego Reader, San
Diego Union-Tribune, Santa Fe Reporter, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, SCOTXblog, Scripps Howard News
Service, SF Public Press, Southern California Public Radio, Spinwatch, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St.
Petersburg Times, Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism (Columbia), StarNews, Statesman Journal,
Sunlight Foundation, Talking Points Memo, TBD, Texas Tribune, The Advocate, The Atlantic, The Bureau of
Investigative Journalism, The Charleston Gazette, The Coast, The Journal-Standard, The Lens, The New
Yorker, The News Journal, The Oklahoman, The Register-Guard, The Seattle Times, The Skanner, The
Story, The Watchdog Institute, Thomson Reuters, Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Tucson
Sentinel, UBC School of Journalism, UCSF Legacy Tobacco Documents Library and Drug Industry Document
Archive, US Local News Network, USA Today, Vancouver Sun, Voice of San Diego, Voices of Montana,
Washington Post, Western Citizen, Wichita Eagle, Wired.com, Wisconsin Center for Investigative
Journalism, WNYC Radio, WTXF Fox 29, York Daily Record.
150 organizations
contributing documents.
Use DocumentCloud to get more out of your source documents. When you upload a document, we OCR it and send the text to an entity extraction engine called OpenCalais.
OpenCalais, a proprietary product from Reuters, uses a combination of grammatical analysis and a closed vocabulary to extract the names of people, places, organizations, industry terms and much more from your document. We give you easy access to that data inside our workspace.
We also search your document for date information – you can select several documents and plot them on a timeline to see all the dates that appear in the text of each. Hover over a date to see its context in your document or select a range to zoom in for more detail.
You can search for related documents – our system draws on that entity data to identify public documents in our catalog that appear to have keywords in common.
Expand any category to see the full list of terms in that category. Select a term to refine your search by that term.
Use “show pages” to view thumbnail images of each page where the term appears.
Collaborate: when you upload a document, you decide how public it is. You can keep it wholly private, share it with all users registered to your organization or make it public.
With shared projects, you can also add documents to a single folder and share that folder with any DocumentCloud user, in any newsroom.
Our viewer makes it dead simple to draw a box around text you'd like to annotate, and create a note about that text.
Private annotations are visible only to you. Public annotations are as public as your document.
You can review the notes on multiple documents from inside the workspace.
When you publish documents on your own site they become part of our catalog. This winter, when we open DocumentCloud to public searches, anyone will be able to search for documents and find your reporting.
Expanded, an annotation highlights the area you selected and provides context about the passage or image. Here, WNYC has used annotations to highlight potential problems with New York City's new paper ballots: The Brennan Center, a local think tank first noticed that New York City's ballot instructions erroneously advised voters to mark the “oval above” their candidate of choice. In fact, the correct oval is always below a candidate's name.
On closer inquiry, Brennan learned that state law explicitly specified the confusing language. WNYC posted the law itself for readers to view.
Closed, the annotation is as unobtrusive as a highlighter.
Expand the annotation by clicking on it: readers can see the passage along with any context provided by the document contributor. Every annotation has a unique URL. When you access an annotation with its URL it automatically loads expanded.
Post one off documents, or organize your documents into a package. Our API will help you manage that. Minnesota Public Radio published over 200 pages of Paul Wellstone's FBI files, from their early surveillance of Wellstone the civil rights and anti-war activist to their investigation of threats against him while he was on the presidential campaign trail.
They presented the document collection on a landing page for their reporting package, and link to individual documents and annotations throughout their reporting.
Minnesota Public Radio chose to use a full screen viewer rather than incorporating the embedded viewer into their standard template.
When Memphis' Commercial Appeal established the identity of one of the FBI's many confidential informants, they used DocumentCloud to tell the story. Ernest Withers was the photographer responsible for some of the most iconic behind-the-scenes images of the civil rights movement.
Whithers was also a paid informant for the FBI. That's not a charge anyone makes lightly, but using DocumentCloud ...
… Commercial Appeal reporter Marc Perrusquia used an annotation to point readers to the very passage where Withers is identified as informant “ME 338-R.”
Throughout the rest of the FBI files, some of which were released in the early 90s with Withers identified only by his id number, Perrusquia used DocumentCloud annotations to highlight information attributed to informant ME 338-R.
Readers are able to review the whole document, to decide for themselves whether the connection is credible or was taken out of context.
Whether you've got commission reports that put BP's Deepwater Horizon gulf spill in context …
… or Mark Twain's early letters, DocumentCloud is a great way to bring readers along on your reporting journey.
Our OCR couldn't read Twain's handwriting, but we worked with NewsHour to provide a quality transcription of his letters.
In Oct of 2010, just 8 months into our beta, we were hosting hundreds of thousands of pages of documents for nearly 150 news organizations, dozens of which were actively embedding those documents on their own websites already.
Nearly 150 news and research organizations are participating in our beta. They're using our tools now and helping us make them stronger for future users.
When you publish documents on your own site they become part of our catalog. This winter, when we open DocumentCloud to public searches, anyone will be able to search for documents and find your reporting.
See http://www.documentcloud.org/contact for more information about how you can join us.
