#documentcloud

Over the past year the DocumentCloud team has been working hard to create better solutions for journalists and the public at large to share, analyze, annotate and, ultimately, publish source documents to the web. In the past six months we have seen great growth in DocumentCloud’s capabilities including the ability to de-index documents, some API changes, new translations of the DocumentCloud website, several new Add-Ons and new paid features.

There were more than 4000 families living in FEMA provided housing (typically trailers) in November 2022. FEMA updates this number weekly in their Daily Operations Briefings but the Briefings are only available as PDFs of slide decks shared to email list. The Data Liberation Project is compiling those PDFs into a searchable repository and extracting the housing counts into a public, structured data set. We’ll look at how Singer-Vine is approaching the project and how you’ll be able to use the tools he is building to develop your own data sets from useful numbers trapped in PDFs 

Join us on January 31 for a conversation with The Data Liberation Project

We're starting our 2023 virtual conversations by chatting with Jeremy Singer-Vine, director of The Data Liberation Project and the voice behind Data is Plural, "a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets." Singer-Vine will be chatting with us about his journey, his vision for The Data Liberation Project and his experiences developing an RSS Document Fetcher Add-On for DocumentCloud as part of the Gateway Grant effort he is currently undertaking: creating a real-time archive and public dataset of FEMA housing reports.

RSVP to Join Us

MuckRock’s Gateway Grants support projects that preserve critical document collections

The Data Liberation Project was one of four initial recipients of MuckRock’s Gateway Grants Program. With support from the Filecoin Foundation for the Distributed Web, MuckRock provides grants to explore  ways to leverage technology to preserve access to significantly consequential document collections.

Each grantee has been awarded $10,000 and technical assistance for their projects. The tools they build are open source and available for use by all DocumentCloud users in the form of new capabilities via Add-Ons. DocumentCloud users benefit from the growing library of new functionalities. Any user can write and share a DocumentCloud extension with Add-Ons.

In November 2017, the Knight Foundation published a collection of 10 profiles of organizations that received Knight News Challenge grants from it over the past decade. I wrote five of these stories, which you can read at the Knight Foundation website by clicking the links below:

DIY SCIENCE TOOLS COST LITTLE, CREATE BIG IMPACT IN MONITORING THE ENVIRONMENT

https://knightfoundation.org/articles/di…