Getting your documents into Overview — the complete guide Jonathan Stray.
From the post:
The first and most common question from Overview users is how do I get my documents in? The answer varies depending the format of your material. There are three basic paths to get documents into Overview: as multiple PDFs, from a single CSV file, and via DocumentCloud. But there are several other tricks you might need, depending on your situation.
Great coverage of the first step towards using Overview.
Just in case you are not familiar with Overview (for the about page):
Overview is an open-source tool to help journalists find stories in large numbers of documents, by automatically sorting them according to topic and providing a fast visualization and reading interface. Whether from government transparency initiatives, leaks or Freedom of Information requests, journalists are drowning in more documents than they can ever hope to read.
There are good tools for searching within large document sets for names and keywords, but that doesn’t help find the stories you’re not specifically looking for. Overview visualizes the relationships among topics, people, and places to help journalists to answer the question, “What’s in there?”
Overview is designed specifically for text documents where the interesting content is all in narrative form — that is, plain English (or other languages) as opposed to a table of numbers. It also works great for analyzing social media data, to find and understand the conversations around a particular topic.
It’s an interactive system where the computer reads every word of every document to create a visualization of topics and sub-topics, while a human guides the exploration. There is no installation required — just use the free web application. Or you can run this open-source software on your own server for extra security. The goal is to make advanced document mining capability available to anyone who needs it.
Examples of people using Overview? See Completed Stories for a sampling.
Overview is a good response to government “disclosures” that attempt to hide wheat in lots of chaff.