4 ms·

Help analyze Donald Rumsfeld’s memos

68 points by danso 9y ago

cryptoz 9y ago
It seems they are all images - not OCR'd, and the task requested is to manually read and type summaries. That's useful but it seems like a good place to start would be to OCR it and provide a searchable copy.
- danso 9y ago
  The call-to-action [0] in the submitted article is meant more for serendipitous crowdsourcing, so the image/scan is presumably enough for that usecase. The actual dump (i.e. "tranche") of memos is hosted on DocumentCloud, which has the underlying OCR data per page, and is searchable: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755-11-L-0559-First-Release-Bates-1-912.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755-11-L-0559-Fi... You can directly download the PDF (913 pages) here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755/11-L-0559-First-Release-Bates-1-912.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755/11-L-0559... [0] https://www.muckrock.com/assignment/help-explore-donald-rumsfelds-snowflakes-30/form/ https://www.muckrock.com/assignment/help-explore-donald-rums...
  - cryptoz 9y ago
    Excellent, much more interesting! Thanks!
    - knowtheory 9y ago
      Oh thanks for pointing this out. I'll hit the Muckrock team up and see if we can get the text button in there.
  - imglorp 9y ago
    Page 510 appears to be discussing who needs overthrowing. It's a letter to Rumsfeld from the American Foreign Policy council. > Under a Smith-Richardson grant, AFPC Senior Fellow, Elie Krakowski hs been exploring ways to replace the Taliban government. During the past year, he has held discussions with relevant officials in Pakistan, India, Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and an anti-Taliban area of Afghanistan. > Someone from your policy shop should debrief him. His phone is 410-xxxxxxx.
ajkjk 9y ago
The date submission form is broken in Chrome and won't let me type in anything that it perceives as valid. Which is a shame because the one I found was really interesting!
- morisy 9y ago
  Thanks for trying to help, and yes date picker needs work! Should accept typed dates in this format: 05/31/2018 To pick older dates you can scroll back to the oldest year, pick a random date, and then open it again and it will let you go back further. Very rough but it’s a newly launched tool we’re working quickly to improve.

68 points by danso 9y ago

It seems they are all images - not OCR'd, and the task requested is to manually read and type summaries. That's useful but it seems like a good place to start would be to OCR it and provide a searchable copy.

danso 9y ago
The call-to-action [0] in the submitted article is meant more for serendipitous crowdsourcing, so the image/scan is presumably enough for that usecase. The actual dump (i.e. "tranche") of memos is hosted on DocumentCloud, which has the underlying OCR data per page, and is searchable: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755-11-L-0559-First-Release-Bates-1-912.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755-11-L-0559-Fi... You can directly download the PDF (913 pages) here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755/11-L-0559-First-Release-Bates-1-912.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755/11-L-0559... [0] https://www.muckrock.com/assignment/help-explore-donald-rumsfelds-snowflakes-30/form/ https://www.muckrock.com/assignment/help-explore-donald-rums...
- cryptoz 9y ago
  Excellent, much more interesting! Thanks!
  - knowtheory 9y ago
    Oh thanks for pointing this out. I'll hit the Muckrock team up and see if we can get the text button in there.
- imglorp 9y ago
  Page 510 appears to be discussing who needs overthrowing. It's a letter to Rumsfeld from the American Foreign Policy council. > Under a Smith-Richardson grant, AFPC Senior Fellow, Elie Krakowski hs been exploring ways to replace the Taliban government. During the past year, he has held discussions with relevant officials in Pakistan, India, Russia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and an anti-Taliban area of Afghanistan. > Someone from your policy shop should debrief him. His phone is 410-xxxxxxx.

ajkjk 9y ago

The date submission form is broken in Chrome and won't let me type in anything that it perceives as valid. Which is a shame because the one I found was really interesting!

morisy 9y ago
Thanks for trying to help, and yes date picker needs work! Should accept typed dates in this format: 05/31/2018 To pick older dates you can scroll back to the oldest year, pick a random date, and then open it again and it will let you go back further. Very rough but it’s a newly launched tool we’re working quickly to improve.