DocumentCloud’s entities show you, at a glance, the people who are mentioned the most times in a given project, or the organizations that are named in each of the documents you’ve selected. Here’s how it works now:

Click on the “show pages” link next to any entity to reveal a thumbnail of each page in each document that contains that term, alongside excerpts highlighting the mention of the entity in the text. Clicking on the highlighted phrase will take you directly to term within the document itself. In the screenshot below, you can see how the Environmental Protection Agency was correctly identified by both its proper name and its acronym.

We’ve added excerpts to the timeline as well. When you open a timeline from the Analyze menu and scroll over any date, you’ll see a few words along with the date as it appears in the document–useful for corroborating a single event across multiple sources or for comparing different accounts of what should be a shared timeline. Click on a date to go straight to the point in the document where that date appears.

Hopefully excerpts will come in handy for your DocumentCloud projects. If you think of a way we can make them even more useful, comment or let us know.

You’ll still use the “New Documents” button, but now that button takes you straight to a file selection dialog.
Use the control (on MS Windows) or command (on Macs) key to select additional documents, just like you would in your file browser.

We’ll start you off by suggesting a title, based on each file’s name, but you can edit that name and add additional information, including the source of each document and a description. As with the old upload dialog, you can decide right when you upload your document whether or not you’re ready to share it with the world yet. As ever, you can edit all of these fields again later.

If your documents share a common source or description, use the “Apply to All Files” link to copy your metadata to each document in this batch. Note: this new upload interface requires Flash. If that’s an issue for you, let us know ASAP and we’ll whip up an alternate interface that doesn’t require any plugins. Promise.

As the files upload from your computer to DocumentCloud, you’ll see the progress of each transfer.

Better Processing, Too
This week’s release is more than just a new upload dialog. We’ve made some big changes to Docsplit and the RightAWS gem, and we’re hoping this means the dreaded “import failed” error will be a thing of the past. If looking under the hood is your thing, both Docsplit and our fork of RightAWS are on on github for your viewing (and reusing) pleasure.

Don’t be a Stranger
If you have gigabytes worth of documents to upload, get in touch before you start uploading so we can add more horsepower to handle your job. Otherwise, happy uploading! And don’t forget to tell us about what you’re publishing with DocumentCloud.

Related documents can span all documents visible to your account, including documents that other organizations have made public.

Under the hood, we are using a technique known as tf/idf, which compares document similarity by looking at the “important” words across a set of documents. The importance of each word is evaluated by weighing the frequency of use of each word in a particular, divided by the frequency of the word in the collection of documents as a whole. In this manner, commonly used words drop out of the index, and distinctive words obtain greater importance. The search engine we use for DocumentCloud, Lucene, has this type of search built-in.

We’re still at work on improving this feature. At the moment, you’ll notice two things: there is a long tail of barely-related documents that follows the first page of results, and shorter documents (1-3 pages) may find no related documents whatsoever. But for most documents with high-quality text, you’ll find that the related documents at the top are very relevant.

There’s one more thing that we released at the same time: a panel that allows you to edit all the information that describes your documents (title, source, description, access level) at a stroke. To use it, click on the pencil icon that now appears next to any document. Naturally, you can also select multiple documents and edit all of their attributes simultaneously.