New/s/Leak User Manual

new/s/leak (= the network of searchable leaks) is a journalistic software for investigating and visualizing large textual datasets.

The current prototype can be accessed here. The software has been developed by LT Group at Universität Hamburg and GRIS Group at TU Darmstadt in co-operation with Spiegel-Verlag.

The software is available at Github https://github.com/uhh-lt/newsleak.

The software development was funded by Volkswagenstiftung as a part oft the project Science and Data-Driven Journalism: Data Extraction and Interactive Visualization of Unexplored Textual Datasets for Investigative Data-Driven Journalism. More information about the project can be found at http://newsleak.io/.

Users can browse through the document collection using an interactive visual interface. It enables faceted document exploration within several views:

1. Graph view: shows named entities and their relations.
2. Frequency overview: Shows the number of documents for entities or metadata according to the current filter.
3. Document timeline view: shows the document frequency over time for the active filters
4. Document overview: a list of the documents from the input text document collection with respect to the active filters
5. History view: shows the user’s browsing interactions with the system (search, filtering by entity, time or metadata (e. g. classification level) and annotations.
6. Search: Input pane for free-text search.
7. Settings and information panel: A panel with additional functions such as settings, information or help.