Datashare Redesign: Powerful Research Tool for Everyone
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Datashare, the powerful research tool behind the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) groundbreaking investigations like the pandora Papers, has received a significant redesign. This update focuses on making the platform more accessible, powerful, and collaborative for journalists, researchers, and anyone working with large volumes of documents. Available for free download, Datashare empowers users to analyse complex datasets and uncover hidden connections.
The latest version of Datashare introduces a suite of features designed to streamline research, enhance collaboration, and unlock deeper insights from your documents. Here’s a detailed look at the key improvements:
Smarter Search Capabilities
Forget complex search operators! Datashare now boasts a user-kind search form that allows you to quickly find what you need without needing to remember intricate commands like AND, OR, or NOT. Simply input your keywords and let Datashare do the heavy lifting.
Further enhancing the search experience is the new split view feature. When working with PDFs,you’ll now see both the extracted text and the original document side-by-side. This allows for instant verification and context,letting you quickly pinpoint the exact page where your search term appears.
Collaboration and Staying Informed
Datashare understands the importance of teamwork. The redesign introduces shared saved searches,enabling you to easily share your research parameters with colleagues – mirroring the functionality already available for batch searches.
Never miss crucial updates.The new alerts feature allows you to set up notifications that will inform you when new documents added to Datashare match your specified search terms, ensuring you stay on top of emerging details.
Expanding Data Sources and Improving Accuracy
Datashare is breaking down data silos. The platform now includes speech-to-text functionality,allowing you to extract text from audio and video files,opening up entirely new avenues for investigation.
We’re also committed to improving the quality of extracted data. A key focus is structured content extraction, aiming to preserve the original layout and structure of documents for more accurate and meaningful analysis. We’re actively seeking user feedback on this feature – you can contribute by filling out our short survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeThKmdrCUigCUnDMpWonG-KV-twAresdKZvd4uEgOFNKJfEg/viewform?usp=sharing.we recognize that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) isn’t always perfect. The new re-extract text from documents feature allows you to flag scanned documents for reprocessing if the initial text recognition is imperfect, ensuring the highest possible accuracy.
enhanced Context and Analysis
Understanding the context of information is critical. We’re planning to introduce customizable highlights, allowing you to control the length and number of highlighted sections when searching for a name or key term. This will provide a speedy and clear overview of how that term is used within the documents.
Anyone can download Datashare for free and begin working with their own documents locally on their computer: http://datashare.icij.org.
For teams requiring collaborative access, a robust server version is available for advanced technologists to set up, enabling shared document analysis online: https://icij.gitbook.io/datashare/server-mode/about-the-server-mode. Older versions of Datashare remain accessible at http://datashare.icij.org.
We Want Your Feedback!
The Datashare redesign represents a significant step forward in empowering investigative journalism and data analysis. We are committed to continuous advancement and value your input. Please share your feedback