Live tool
Search the Flint Water Crisis archive
Meaning-based search, running in your browser, over 300,000+ documents released under Freedom of Information Act requests from the Flint Water Crisis in Flint, MI (USA).
Search the Flint archiveFree, no sign-up · 300,000+ FOIA documents
About the project
Digital correspondence is a rich record of how social networks form and act, including the often obscure dynamics of government decision-making. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public records laws, troves of intragovernmental correspondence are publicly available for analysis, yet routinely published in practically inaccessible formats: scanned printouts of email chains.
Data science tools have a significant role to play in revealing the insights locked away in these datasets. The toolkit provides:
- Batch processing that turns large, inaccessible data dumps of digital correspondence into time-indexed, queryable graph representations.
- An integrated approach to NLP and network analysis that reveals social network structure and quantifies how different kinds of information (ideas, facts, beliefs, questions, requests, demands) spread.
The toolkit is under active development and headed for an open-source release. Its testbed is a 300,000+ image dataset of FOIA responses from the Flint Water Crisis, which you can explore now with the search tool.