Comments on: MIT Financial Explorer: Opening the Brown Book data for everyone https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/05/13/mit-financial-explorer-opening-the-brown-book-data-for-everyone/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 13 May 2015 16:20:32 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: EthanZ https://partnews.mit.edu/2015/05/13/mit-financial-explorer-opening-the-brown-book-data-for-everyone/#comment-117198 Tue, 02 Jun 2015 13:58:34 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=7049#comment-117198 Really looking forward to seeing this one on the Tech’s site – I think the article you present there will serve as completion of the assignment, which involves both building the tool and writing a story with it. As you guys know, I’m more interested in the sponsor side of this than the researcher side – I think it makes it easier to ask big questions: what percent of money supporting MIT is government versus commercial? What percent is private foundations? What percent is military?

I think you accomplished something very impressive with converting this massive stack of PDFs into machine readable data. Here’s hoping for something next year that lets your successors focus on the data and storytelling, not on the scraping.

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