Help analyze Donald Rumsfeld’s memos | Hacker News Reader

Help analyze Donald Rumsfeld’s memos

muckrock.com

68 pointsdanso7 comments

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.

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-Fi...

You can directly download the PDF (913 pages) here:

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4357755/11-L-0559...

[0] https://www.muckrock.com/assignment/help-explore-donald-rums...

Excellent, much more interesting! Thanks!

Oh thanks for pointing this out. I'll hit the Muckrock team up and see if we can get the text button in there.

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.

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!

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.

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