100,000 Documents and Counting (with Nathan Story)

Lights Out Mass is a podcast about government transparency — or the lack thereof — in Massachusetts. Hosted by Andrew Quemere of The Mass Dump and Jeff Raymond of MassTransparency.For the sixth episode, we speak with Nathan Story, the programmer and records aficionado behind State Reference — a huge, searchable collection of Massachusetts public records that will soon prove to be an indispensable resource for journalists and researchers.We discuss Nathan’s old project, Woke Windows, and how it led him to conceive State Reference, the importance of machine-readable text and other seemingly stodgy technical details, how Nathan used web scraping to amass his huge collection of documents, why journalists should show their work, why it’s so goddamn annoying when cities and towns don’t post their email addresses online — and how Andrew is very envious that Jeff and Nathan are playing Baldur’s Gate 3.Stick around at the end for a bonus discussion of MassCourts.org, the infamously infuriating website for state trial-court records.(Sorry about the issue with Nathan’s audio quality. We fixed it a few minutes into the podcast, so please don’t let it scare you off!)If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscibe for future episodes! You can find us on Substack, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.You can find links discussed in this podcast here: https://andrewqmr.substack.com..../p/the-incredible-sh theme music is “Sun Bleach” by Lifeformed. Music available here: https://lifeformed.bandcamp.co....m/album/fastfallSunl is the best disinfectant! <br/><br/>Get full access to The Mass Dump at andrewqmr.substack.com/subscribe