Sifter

Sifter is a visual sense-making tool geared for investigative researchers. It lets researchers visualize their work, find sources and publish with rich interactive media. The idea behind Sifter is to make the investigative process faster and more engaging for researchers and the people who read their work.

Sifter has a number of features to help with that research:

• Upload and Reference Files: You can upload or reference text and image files from your own desktop or find them through open-source databases and public APIs.
• Rapid Search: Indexing and ordering files ahead of time means you can rapidly search them with OCR and natural language processing techniques to get a handle on raw data.
• Entity Relationship Identification: The tool can help you find connections between entities, whether companies or people, as you add data, with AI help.

Interactive storytelling is another Sifter feature. You can create interactive diagrams that can be embedded in articles. Those diagrams can be part of larger interactive mini-sites that present stories in episodes with videos, charts, maps and timelines.

Sifter also has a crowdsource verification system that lets fact-checking be fueled by crowd-sourced evidence and peer-reviewed validation. That can make research more collaborative and more reliable.

Sifter also can aggregate news coverage from multiple sources, presenting a more nuanced view of a story through interactive timelines, maps and smart topic tagging. Researchers can publish their research directly to the site, and readers can subscribe to newsletters with interactive source research.

The site is geared for independent investigators, making their lives easier and helping them reach new readers who might be willing to pay for their work. Sifter's goal is to build a future where investigators can work without obstacles.

Pricing isn't disclosed, but you can subscribe to the newsletter to follow Sifter developments and tips on investigations. There are also open positions and a donation mechanism if you want to help with the project.

Published on June 13, 2024