We're starting our 2023 virtual conversations on January 31 at 1 p.m. Eastern time by chatting with Jeremy Singer-Vine (pictured left), 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.

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 an 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. 

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.