You’ll notice a lot of changes to when you next log in to DocumentCloud. We’re still working hard to make DocumentCloud work better, and we hope that our new layout will make it much easier to access and use the entities (aka keywords: people, places, organizations, terms…) that OpenCalais provides. You’ll also notice a ton of little improvements, if you look closely.
Entities:
You can now view all the entities that OpenCalais identified in your search results by clicking over to the “Entities” tab at any time. The number alongside each term shows you how many documents in your results contain each term. Select any term to filter your search to include that term and then use the “show pages” link to see each page on which a term appears.
View More Documents:
In addition to viewing the details of each document in a list, you can now choose to display a grid of your documents as thumbnails, with 30 documents on a page. This should make it easier to organize projects, and scan through search results.
Visualizations:
Many of our (very cool, we realize) keyword visualizations are gone. The timeline is still there to show you what dates appear where in your documents, but gone are the swooping lines that highlighted exactly which documents contained any particular entity term. As you probably noticed if you tried to use them for more than just a test drive, they were a little too limited to be useful.
You can still access all the information you used to be able to get from those visualizations through the new entities tab, in what is hopefully a far more helpful fashion, but we’re taking the visual displays back to the workshop for the time being.
The workspace’s new look is thanks to the talented Folkert Gorter, the interface designer responsible for Cargo and Good.is, among other fine work. We’re continuing to work together closely on the workspace and other portions of DocumentCloud, as we move into the home stretch of our first year.
DocumentCloud is still very much in beta and we continue to welcome your suggestions, bug reports and feedback.
