Source Material: Upload Your Own Sources

Source material is the foundation of your analysis in Hinsley. While Hinsley automatically discovers content through its Saved Searches, source material represents content that you have specifically curated—links, articles, reports, and uploaded documents—that you consider important to your analysis. These materials carry greater weight than standard search results when Hinsley generates scenarios, decompositions, and written outputs.

Adding Source Material

There are several ways to add source material to an analysis. All methods are available from the Source Material tab in the left sidebar.

Add a URL

Enter a URL in the text field at the top of the Source Material tab. Hinsley will fetch the page content, generate a summary, and assess the relevance of the content to your analysis topic. If the URL has already been added, Hinsley will let you know.

Upload a File

Upload documents directly using the Upload button. Supported file types include PDF, Word (DOCX), plain text, CSV, HTML, and ODT files, up to 10 MB each. Hinsley extracts the text content automatically so it can be used across your analysis.

Bulk Add Links

If you have multiple URLs to add at once, use the Bulk Add Links option. Paste one URL per line and Hinsley will process them all, reporting how many were successfully added, how many already existed, and whether any were invalid.

Save from Search Results

When reviewing search results in the Search Results tab, you can promote any result to source material by clicking the save icon. This moves the result into your curated collection, giving it the higher priority that source material receives.

How Hinsley Processes Source Material

When you add source material, Hinsley processes it in the background through several steps:

  1. Content extraction — For URLs, Hinsley fetches the page and extracts readable content. For uploaded files, it extracts the text from the document format.
  2. Summarization — Hinsley generates a concise summary of the content for quick reference.
  3. Relevance assessment — Hinsley evaluates how relevant the content is to your analysis topic, assigning a relevance level of High, Medium, or Low. You can adjust this manually at any time.

Once processing is complete, each piece of source material displays its title, source domain, publication date, summary, and relevance level in the Source Material tab.

Relevance Levels

Each piece of source material has a relevance level that determines how it is prioritized across your analysis:

  • High — Manually added content defaults to High relevance. These materials are prioritized in all AI-generated content.
  • Medium — Content that is relevant but not central to the analysis. Still included in generated outputs.
  • Low — Tangentially related content. Available for chat and search but excluded from generated outputs.
  • None — Setting relevance to None archives the material, removing it from active use.

You can change the relevance level of any source material at any time using the dropdown on the document row.

How Source Material Is Used

Source material is woven throughout Hinsley’s analysis capabilities:

  • Scenario generation & likelihood updates — Source material provides context that shapes how Hinsley generates and refines scenarios and their likelihoods.
  • Decomposition — When generating drivers and indicators, Hinsley draws on source material to ground its analysis in your curated evidence.
  • Chat — When discussing your analysis with Hinsley, it can search and read your source material to provide informed, evidence-based responses.
  • Written outputs — Source material can be included as context when generating action memos, one-page briefs, blog posts, and other outputs.
  • Red teaming — You can run a red team analysis against any individual piece of source material to stress-test its conclusions.
  • Translation — Source material can be translated into other languages if the content supports it.