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Cross posted from PBS Idealab.

Brainstorming the next brilliant News Challenge project? I’ve got two for you, and you’ve got until fall to noodle over them.

As the program director for DocumentCloud I spend a lot of time talking to journalists, writers and researchers about what DocumentCloud is and, often, what it isn’t. DocumentCloud is great for documents. It is a repository of primary source texts and a great set of semantic analysis tools for text.

Whether you want to use our annotation tools for reporting jujitsu, as ProPublica did when the subject of an extensive report offered only “no comment” on nearly every question put to them, or to put broken news back together, as the Chicago Tribune did with the former Illinois governor’s attempts to subpoena President Obama, DocumentCloud is great. For documents.

What About Video, Data?

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’ll 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.

Data sets are everywhere. Reporters have them, advocates have them. Transportation Alternatives spends a lot of time FOIA-ing data like the location and severity of pedestrian and cyclist injuries on New York City streets. I happen to know them unusually well (my better half has worked there for almost a decade) but they’re not unique. I’ve had similar conversations with reporters all over the country, reporters with interesting data sets and nowhere to put them.

Video confuses me a little more, but it might just not be my thing. Nonetheless, almost every time I give a presentation, whether it is to a newsroom or a conference, someone asks, “What about video?” My answer is pretty simple: no, no video. No plans to support video. Video and audio material is not text, and figuring out a great way to handle audio clips or videos is just not part of our project. But I get asked about it often enough that I can tell you for sure: There’s something there.

Discuss In Need of a DocumentCloud for Video, Data on PBS’s IdeaLab.

DocumentCloud is still in beta. One thing that means is that it gets better every day. Or almost every day. A few recent improvements are worth noting:

Manage Access from the Edit Menu
Sharp eyed users will notice that the “Manage” pulldown has disappeared. If you want to delete, publish (or un-publish) documents, you can do that right from the Edit pulldown.

Related Reporting

If you’ve published a story that made use of a document you uploaded to DocumentCloud, you can tell us about it by adding the URL to the “Related Article” field, available from the edit menu.

Links to your reporting will then appear in the document viewer if someone finds your documents through a search of public documents.

Click and Double-Click

We heard you loud and clear: clicking thumbnails to “select” and titles to “open” wasn’t intuitive. We changed all that. Now you can select anywhere on a document’s thumbnail, title or description. Click once to select it and twice to open it.

Try out ctrl-click (command-click for you Mac users) and shift-click as well: you’ll find they work a lot more like they do on your desktop.

Want to join the beta? Write to info@documentcloud.org and tell us about the documents you’re working with.

Reblogged from the PBS IdeaLab.

Eagle-eyed followers of the DocumentCloud Twitter feed have already picked up on the fact that we began adding users to our beta last month.

We made a strategic decision to peg our beta to NICAR’s March 2010 computer assisted reporting conference, where we knew we’d be able to gather a sizable group of just the sort of investigative reporters we hope to support with DocumentCloud, and get them excited about using our tools to do more with their documents. Nothing beats hands-on support when you’re using a new tool. Plus, we identified dozens of quick fixes we could make after watching over journalists’ shoulders as they explored DocumentCloud.

In the month since NICAR, we’ve added more than 150 users who’ve uploaded a cumulative 54,000 pages of text, and made close to 300 documents available in DocumentCloud. Our repository is already home to police reports from New Orleans, a confirmation hearing transcript that adds context to coverage of Justice Stevens’ resignation, and disaster preparedness plans from Haiti. There’s even a collection of emails that document how some hedge funds not only saw the mortgage crash coming, but wagered on the collapse and won big. (The hedge fund that these reporters investigated argues it never had the hands-on role ascribed to them; that’s in DocumentCloud, too.) Eventually, anyone will be able to connect with those documents right through our website.

Want to be part of the beta? Get in touch and tell us a bit about the documents you’re working with.

We’re still adding beta testers and actively listening to the users we’ve got as we prioritize and refine our to do lists, but we think we’re off to a great start.

Cross posted from PBS Idealab.

Eagle-eyed followers of the DocumentCloud Twitter feed have already picked up on the fact that we began adding users to our beta last month.

We made a strategic decision to peg our beta to NICAR’s March 2010 computer assisted reporting conference, where we knew we’d be able to gather a sizable group of just the sort of investigative reporters we hope to support with DocumentCloud, and get them excited about using our tools to do more with their documents. Nothing beats hands-on support when you’re using a new tool. Plus, we identified dozens of quick fixes we could make after watching over journalists’ shoulders as they explored DocumentCloud.

Close to 300 documents

In the month since NICAR, we’ve added more than 150 users who’ve uploaded a cumulative 54,000 pages of text, and made close to 300 documents available in DocumentCloud. Our repository is already home to police reports from New Orleans, a confirmation hearing transcript that adds context to coverage of Justice Stevens’ resignation, and disaster preparedness plans from Haiti. There’s even a collection of emails that document how some hedge funds not only saw the mortgage crash coming, but wagered on the collapse and won big. (The hedge fund that these reporters investigated argues it never had the hands-on role ascribed to them; that’s in DocumentCloud, too.) Eventually, anyone will be able to connect with those documents right through our website.

Want to be part of the beta? Get in touch and tell us a bit about the documents you’re working with.

We’re still adding beta testers and actively listening to the users we’ve got as we prioritize and refine our to do lists, but we think we’re off to a great start.

Discuss Documents Pouring in as DocumentCloud Goes Beta on PBS’s IdeaLab.