Since we last updated readers on DocumentCloud’s progress, we’ve made it much easier to upload a lot of documents at once, and introduced a related documents search that uses data about names and places provided by OpenCalais to find documents that are probably related to the one you’re looking at. We’ve also added a bit more contextto the data we help reporters comb through. Most of this work is happening inside the gates of the DocumentCloud workspace, but it is resulting in some lively reporting. For example…
Using Documents to Tell the Story
This summer, as the federal 5th Circuit Court of Appeals prepared to hear arguments in a challenge to the University of Texas’s affirmative action policy, Texas Tribune complemented its coverage of the case with nearly 200 pages of annotated court documents, including the original district court ruling, the university’s appellate brief, as well as that of the plaintiffs in the case.
The Las Vegas Sun incorporated quite a trove of documents into its series on hospital care in Las Vegas. Readers were invited to browse everything from Department of Health and Human Services reports to individual records, right along with the Sun’s reporters. When they say that hospital-acquired infections cost the country $30 billion per year or account for close to 100,000 deaths, they back each number up with original documents.
The Columbia Missourian annotated the city budget and took a local blogger to task for exaggerating Columbia, Missouri’s cash reserves.
When Texas Governor Rick Perry challenged reporters to find anyone who can out-work him, Texas Tribune posted the governor’s May 2010 schedule alongside that of Florida’s Gov. Crist, New York’s Gov. Paterson and California’s Gov. Schwarzenegger and invited readers to help them skim over a hundred pages of briefings, receptions and photo ops for stories deserving of a closer look.
The Washington Post supplemented its reporting on the cozy relationship between the oil industry and the federal agency assigned to regulate them with an annotated report on the prospects for “Moving beyond Conflict” between regulator and regulated. Their document cache also included reports outlining just how cozy things had gotten by 2008. As Emily Keller pointed out in Free Government Info, a transparency project, documents like these give more transparency to journalism itself.
New Features in the Testing Lab
We’re also hard at work fine tuning the document viewer, transforming it into something that users could reasonably plug into a template with a narrower content column. Thus far folks have been stuck with a full page viewer. We haven’t fully rolled it out yet, but we’ve worked with a couple of our beta testers to implement it already.
Iowa State has a new men’s basketball coach, and the Des Moines Register included all 14 pages of his contract to their coverage of the finer points contained in it. Among the unusual clauses? Hoiberg can walk away if the university decides to increase academic standards for student athletes beyond the NCAA’s minimum.
Meanwhile, at the Santa Fe Reporter, Alexa Schirtzinger opted not to publish tables of information right inside her story on elder abuse in New Mexico, but she did use her staff blog to share the data that she had such a hard time tracking down. An annotation highlights the numbers that showed her that New Mexico fields more abuse complaints per nursing home bed than any other state.
DocumentCloud watchers will notice that they posted the contract right on the same page as Randy Peterson’s writeup instead of displaying the document in a full page. We’ll be making tweaks like this a lot easier for all of our users. In the meantime, if you’re skilled at the art of reverse engineering JavaScript, you can view the source of the Register’s story (or the Reporter’s) to see just how they toggled the sidebar or zoom on those documents.