Marshall Allen at ProPublica has written a heartbreaking story about a woman whose husband died suddenly and mysteriously in a hospital. An autopsy failed to determine the cause of death, and the case has been tied up in litigation for years.
It’s a good story, but what I’m interested in here is an innovation that ProPublica developed for this story–something called Explore Sources. It allows a reader to click on any highlighted portion of the story to see a small pop-up with the original document that supports that highlighted section.
For example, Allen writes, near the top of the story, “…at about 5 a.m., a phlebotomist entered Jerry’s room to draw blood and found him lying across the bottom of his bed…” If you read the story with “Explore Sources” turned off, you don’t see anything unusual. But if you go to the top of the story and click “Explore Sources: ON,” you see yellow highlights throughout the story. In this sentence, the words “found him” are highlighted. Click on them, and you see a pop-up with an excerpt from a legal document with testimony about how the body was found.
Further, if you click on the pop-up, you go to the entire legal document. Or you can simply close it and keep reading.
Al Shaw, a ProPublica applications developer, explains on ProPublica’s Nerd Blog how he did it. Allen had uploaded 64 documents that he used for the story to DocumentCloud, where they could be annotated and accessed online. He annotated the sections he was using, and was able to link them to appropriate parts of the story. This involved a lot of programming and the cooperation of DocumentCloud (another innovation you should take a look at).
Explore Sources is a fascinating experiment, and I’m all for experiments. But I’m not sure Allen and Shaw have hit on the right formula yet. Reading the story, I felt a bit like a fact-checker. I trust that ProPublica does a good job of checking facts, and I’m not sure I need to see the original source for everything in the story. If I were a competing news organization trying to match the story, this would be a huge help. But I don’t think that’s what ProPublica had in mind. And much the same kind of thing is done with links, although, as ProPublica points out, links take readers away from the story.
I would like to have Explore Sources for what I think are questionable stories, but the writers of such stories are not likely to be eager to show where they got their “facts.”
But Allen and Shaw are on to something here. I’d love to see them try it with a story that relies on scientific documents, of the kind that many of us deal in every day. And I’d like to see them make Explore Sources available to others, if that’s technically possible without a lot of programming.
I consider Explore Sources to be a work in progress. And I’m eager to see where it leads.
– Paul Raeburn
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