Dataproofer is a new, free tool designed to help journalists verify data. The desktop app was developed by the news outlet Vocativ. 

The tool for journalists, writes Adreana Young in Editor & Publisher, works like a spell check for data sheets.  

“We were thinking of creating a tool to validate data, and when we were looking at it, this seemed like it has been a problem in newsrooms,” Gerald Rich, creator of Dataproofer and interactive producer with Vocativ, told E&P. “This is one problem we’ve all known…we’d get these data sets and there’s just something a little off.”

Users create a spreadsheet and drop it into the app where the data is reviewed for duplicative, incorrect, missing and other askew data. The highlighted items should all help reporters and editors to judge the accuracy and reliability of the information quickly and make editorial decisions about the validity of the data. Dataproofer was funded by a $35,000 grant from Knight Prototype Fund.

Rich told E&P, “The goal of this is to not only making this whole process a little more transparent for anyone who gets the data, and that could be a reporter, that could be an editor or someone, but to make sure as soon as you get this data you can give it a quick once over and see what’s there and what’s not there.”

Vocativ describes itself as a miner of data and trends from the deep web to develop story angles, democratizing the data by surfacing stories for the public interest.