How to Find and Redact (Original) Values with Chronicle and Blackout

Building the list of names to use for redacting original values can be a challenging task. Name lists are often incomplete (if they're even supplied), and beyond that, variations on those names abound. 

However, Blackout provides the ability to import lists of names (terms) to redact, so if you can get a good list, redacting those values can be done lickety-split.  Enter Chronicle - and the extremely simple, time-saving Name Normalization projects - to create reliable lists of names to handoff to Blackout for redacting!

Chronicle's Name Normalization functionality is mainly used to help clean up and standardize the myriad versions of names in your documents' metadata.  That being said, what it does along the way is build a list of original values and their normalized values.  These normalized values can be whatever is appropriate for your project.  For Priv Logs (Chronicle's primary raison d'etre), this is usually a person's or organization's legal name. 

But in this alternate world, we're looking for something else…

Start by creating the project in Chronicle.

1. Create a Name Normalization project

2. Choose a Saved Search that includes all of the documents that need to be redacted

3. Select the Fields that contain the metadata that should be redacted.

4. Run Analysis on the project.

NOTE: Chronicle will not find names within other text - it will only find singular or delimited values in fields.  So it won't find "Jed" in this sentence - "Jed is the author of this." but it can find it in "Jed;Steve;Tim"

Then, configure how values should be redacted.

Running Analysis identifies the values we (in theory) want to redact, so we'll need to decide what to do with them. There are a few options:

1. There might be names on the list that SHOULD NOT be redacted.

   1. Handling these can be as simple as ignoring their names entirely (i.e., not "normalizing" them).

   2. An alternative approach, which requires slightly more work than ignoring them, would be normalizing them to something like "Ignore." There are a couple of advantages to this:

      1. Those names drop off the list of names to review since they're already "normalized."

      2. Those names can be reviewed quickly later by filtering on your "Ignore" normalized name.

   
   

2. There are, once again, a couple of options for names that SHOULD be redacted.

   1. If your redactions contain text with different values - e.g., "Custodian A," "Custodian B," etc.- for each set of original values, you will normalize them to that value.

      
      

      

      
      

   2. If your redactions have the exact text (e.g., "Redacted") or are simple black redactions, you can normalize ALL of those original values to the same thing. "Redacted" (or similar) is a good option because you can decide later whether to use the text.

      
      

      

      
      

3. Once you have normalized all the original values you want, you can start importing them into a Blackout project.

QUICK NOTE: In the Name Normalization project, you DO NOT have to complete the "Apply Normalizations" step.  That's only necessary if you want to use these normalized values in Fields in Relativity - something we don't need for this exercise.

Next, get your necessary data out of Chronicle...

1. Navigate to the Manage Normalizations tab. Here, we can see all the normalizations in this workspace.

   
   

2. Select the values you want to export.

   1. If you want all the values, that is the default, so you don't need to do anything else!

   2. If you're looking for something more refined, filter the list based on your choices above:

      1. If you marked some values as "Ignore," you can filter those out

      2. You can choose a subset here by specifying different "normalized" names.

      3. If you used a generic "normalized" name, like "Redacted," you can filter down to those.

   
   

3. Select 'Export all data to CSV' to get a list of Original Values and their Normalized Values.

   

   
   

4. Download and open the CSV.

...and move your data over to Blackout.

For this part, we will create a redaction project using Rules. Since we'll probably be working with many values to redact, we'll use a template to build the project quickly.  

1. Download the Blackout rule import template and open it alongside the CSV you generated with Chronicle.

2. Copy the Original Values column from the Chronicle CSV and drop them into the Word/Phrase column in the Blackout CSV.

3. Using the Markup Subtype "Text," you can copy the Normalized Values column's values into the Rule template's Markup Type column.

4. Fill in any of the remaining configuration options you want in the Blackout CSV and save it.

5. Load the template into a Blackout project.  

Finally, run a redaction project!

From here, you're ready to kick off the redaction job with the project created!  All those names that Chronicle found for you are being redacted without any doc-to-doc, manual redaction needed. 

In addition, you've got a more robust list of names to look out for next time—whether in this case or any other related ones that might come along.

Ready to find and redact original values with Chronicle and Blackout? Reach out ➜