ProPublica experiments with “show your work”

LINK: www.propublica.org ➚ | Posted by: Joshua Benton | December 15, 2011

Check out this Marshall Allen ProPublica story and switch on “Explore Sources.” Cited facts get a highlight and an an onclick popup showing the DocumentCloud annotation that supports it. Pretty cool. Built by Al Shaw on the ProPublica end and Ted Han on the DocCloud end.

Two thoughts: The hooks built for this are available to other DocumentCloud users to build similar tools. (ProPublica plans on open sourcing the annotizer, but it may be a while.) And this on/off UI makes me think it could be useful to built a generic UI for this sort of optional annotation (with links to supporting documents instead of embeds).

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