Document Cloud

Document Cloud is an online tool that enables you to upload, store, share and publish documents online.  

In many ways it is like Scribd, a document sharing website which we have previously highlighted, but whereas Scribd is intended to make online reading in general easier DocumentCloud was built specifically with journalism in mind.

For example, DocumentCloud automatically performs optical character recognition (OCR) on what you upload, and then picks out important names, places, organisations and dates, which is particularly useful if you have a lot of documents to deal with. When you are browsing through documents you have uploaded, a toolbar allows you to sort items based on these keywords.

The sidebar on the left picks out people, organisations or places that recur in uploaded documents.

Documents uploaded to the cloud can be made public or kept private until you choose to release them. Once they are made public, you can embed them into your website or link to their pages on Document Cloud.

Public documents are also added to Document Cloud’s searchable database, which means other journalists or users can access them. Of course, if you’ve got a document you want to keep under wraps, you can just keep it private indefinitely.

You can also share documents with other collaborators who have accounts on the site and make annotations to draw attention to important passages within items. Likewise, these annotations can be set to private or public. DocumentCloud’s annotation tool is another aspect of the service that distinguishes it from Scribd, and if you do publish documents online with annotations it makes it easier for readers to pinpoint the most important details.

Since its launch in March 2010, DocumentCloud has been used by a number of news organisations to enhance their investigative journalism. For example, the Los Angeles Times used DocumentCloud to publish falsified salary information as part of a wider investigation into a corrupt city council while the Chicago Tribune used it to collate documents concerning former Chicago Governer Rod Blagojevich’s corruption trial.

In Australia, DocumentCloud was first utilised by Monash University’s investigative journalism website Dangerous Ground, which used the tool to present reports on the EPA’s activities and documents obtained through FOI on the EPA’s management of a contaminated site in Brunswick. More recently, The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald used DocumentCloud to publish confidential defence documents concerning the war in Afghanistan and an Australian officer’s involvement in Abu Ghraib prison.

In many of these examples the documents were the basis of the stories, meaning that presenting annotated versions of them to readers through DocumentCloud showed (rather than told) the full story.

By uploading primary documents to DocumentCloud and embedding them or linking to them on news websites, journalists can also make their reporting more transparent. Whilst it would have been untenable for a news organisation to publish source documents alongside an article ten or fifteen years ago, thanks to the Internet and third party resources like DocumentCloud, it is easy to present this information to readers for them delve deeper into at their leisure.

DocumentCloud does not cost anything to use but gaining access to the tool is not as easy as simply signing up for an account. Rather, DocumentCloud’s administrators ask you to apply for an account on behalf of your news organisation. The sign-up process is explained in more detail on Document Cloud’s contact page.

-CRAIG BUTT, MPC DIGITAL PRODUCER