Document Analysis — Overview
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Document Analysis — Overview

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Document Analysis — Overview

Purpose: Turn heterogeneous document drops (FOIA, leaks, archives) into searchable, citable evidence.

Core pipeline

  1. Inventory — List formats (PDF, email, images, spreadsheets).
  2. Extract text — Born-digital PDFs vs. scans (OCR).
  3. Normalize — Consistent filenames, date fields, deduplication keys.
  4. Index — Full-text index; optional entity extraction downstream.
  5. Search — Iterative queries; save search strings in a research log.

When to escalate

Situation Action
>100k pages, team collaboration Consider Datashare, Aleph, or dedicated investigation platform
Audio/video central to case Plan transcription pass; see transcription-services.md
Messy relational data OpenRefine before joining to corporate or FEC tables

Related skill

  • document-research-specialist
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