Stylebook¶
Stylebook is your newsroom's shared catalog of the people, organizations, and places in its reporting. Agate finds them article by article; Stylebook connects those findings to records your newsroom can maintain and reuse.
Mentions and canonical records¶
The key distinction is between a mention and a canonical record:
- A mention is one reference to something in one article — "Mayor Jane Doe" appearing in last Tuesday's story.
- A canonical record represents the real-world person, organization, or place — the Jane Doe — to which those mentions point.
A person mentioned in a hundred articles should usually have one canonical record, not a hundred near-duplicates.
The canonical record holds shared details, metadata, geography, and connections. Each mention remains tied to the project, article, and passage that produced it.
What you can do in Stylebook¶
- Find and filter canonical people, organizations, and locations.
- Review the article mentions linked to each record.
- Correct names, aliases, metadata, and location geography.
- Add relationships between records, such as a person working for an organization.
- Resolve uncertain matches and review possible duplicates.
How records get into the catalog¶
There are three ways an entity ends up in Stylebook:
- From reporting. When an Agate flow saves its results, canonicalization links each extracted entity to a known record, creates a record when appropriate, or asks an editor to decide.
- By hand. Editors can create records directly.
- By import. Editors can load records from spreadsheets or geographic files. Administrators can also copy supported records from another Stylebook. See Import & export.
Two kinds of review¶
- Candidate queues contain article entities that are not yet linked to a canonical. Editors can link an existing record, create a new one, or defer the decision.
- Stylebook Review checks existing canonical records for possible duplicates, questionable records, mismatches, and geography-quality issues. Editors decide whether to merge, keep, remove, or dismiss the flagged items.
Candidate queues combine work from all accessible projects assigned to the Stylebook and identify which project produced each item.
Some screens offer AI suggestions. These remain suggestions until an editor accepts them.
The Recent view helps editors follow additions, links, merges, and review decisions. It is an activity feed, not a backup or undo history.
More than one Stylebook¶
An organization can keep more than one Stylebook — for example, separate catalogs for different publications or intentionally separate reference sets — with one designated as the default. Each project is assigned one Stylebook when created. See Managing Stylebooks.
In this section¶
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Entity types | The kinds of records you can catalog |
| Managing Stylebooks | Creating, sharing, and administering catalogs |
| Canonicalization | How article entities are linked, created, or sent for review |
| Mentions & evidence | The article references behind each record |
| Metadata | Editor-maintained facts |
| Connections | Relationships between entities |
| Geography | Locations on a map |
| Import & export | Bulk loading records and copying supported Stylebook content |