Governmental Data Accessibility and Usability: Analyzing Federal Water Spending

This project under the guidance of the Massive Data Institute was designed to take drinking water funding information from every state and convert into usable, parsed data for analysis. States publish this data in PDFs and in a variety of table formats, and sometimes just as prose text. While we were able to use the OCR software provided by the library's premium Adobe products for a couple of the states, I also relied heavily on the LinkedIn Learning courses in Python to catch up on the project and design our own scripts to parse the data. We've since shared this data with the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, who are doing groundbreaking research to examine water funding issues across the nation.