NERD ALERT: I spend a lot of time with documents and other data, so when I heard about a new product from Google to help journalists manage large amounts of records and information, I was quick to sign up.
A shout out here to Investigative Reporters & Editors, where I first heard about Google Pinpoint at IRE’s annual conference.
If you work with a lot of PDF’s, you will find that some are OCR-enabled (Optical Character Recognition) and some are not.
Just try hitting Ctrl+F to search for a word in a document. Sometimes it works, but a lot of times it does not. Now just imagine getting thousands of pages from a government agency and trying to find the one time they mention “Eric Rasmussen.”
Enter Google Pinpoint.
It allows you to upload just about any kind of record into “collections” that you create. I’m talking about PDF’s, J-PEG’s, videos, audio recordings, etc.
Then you can search that entire collection for any word or phrase.
Now, this is the part that blew my mind: Google Pinpoint will also search for anything similar to what you asked for. Example: I was reviewing hundreds of pages of records related to a child protection investigation.
My source told me a child was forced to ‘pee in a corner’ of her room by her foster parents.
An old school search for the word ‘pee’ would have turned up nothing. HOWEVER, when I searched my collection for the same word, Google Pinpoint found multiple instances where social workers wrote that the child said she was forced to ‘urinate’ in her room.
Check out this short demo I created:
Google Pinpoint is also more than an OCR tool.
It will also transcribe the audio of my interviews when I load a video clip into a collection. I know a lot of people use other products to do this, but I’ve found it works reasonably well.
At last check, you do still need to be a working journalist to gain access, but I found the verification process is very fast.
If you haven’t used Pinpoint yet, give it a try and let me know what you think!