Research Ready Government Archives

Partner: Nick Adams, Goodly Labs, Non-Profit & Academic

Overview

Project Description

The Research Ready project seeks two students to help improve and maintain archives of government activity that researchers, journalists, and the public can easily query. The project team has already scraped the web for document files while retaining document metadata; identified and extracted meaningful data objects within the documents; linked those objects to external databases; prepared all this compiled textual data for computational analysis in R and Python; and partnered with the Social Science Research Council to host their newly formed database so that the public and other researchers can launch their own studies of the data. Now, we need people with text analysis and data visualization skills to help us improve this data and visualize it for the public and researchers.

Expected Deliverable

The archives themselves are in very good shape. We’d like to get them in great shape, which will require some testing and revision of our parsing scripts. We’re also hoping for a teammate who can help us create some simple visualizations of the data that will be helpful for researchers, journalists, and the public.

What would a successful semester look like to you?

A successful semester would end with an improved database, and some nifty visualizations that make these tools more compelling for the public.

Data

Models

Conclusion