Ok, reporters. The last two TFRs were a little off-topic, so we’re gonna bring it right back around to the heart of Tools for Reporters: something out-of-the-box that is both free and supremely useful.
I’m talking about DocumentCloud.
A lot of you are probably familiar with DocumentCloud‘s web-hosting and embedding services, so I’ll skip over that. A lot of people don’t realize or utiilze some of its niftier features:
You’re looking at an “entity analysis” of a document, which means dcloud found all the people, places and organizations and laid them out my easy reading. You can even hover over where the name appears in the doc and get a sense of its context.
Dcloud will do the same with dates, as I addressed in an earlier TFR on timelines. Either way, its analysis skills are freaking amazing, and I don’t know of another tool that has quite so many features wrapped up into one free website.
If you want to OCR, analyze, annotate… do anything to a document, really, I highly recommend checking out its other skills!