Pork Trek II: The Wrath of Blogs

Yesterday I expressed my profound disappointment with the state senate’s obstruction of fiscal justice. “New Yorkers,” they seemed to be saying, “You can have our pork info in a usable format when you pry it from our cold, dead hands.”

RT reader Mikros replied in the comments:

So print it, scan it, and use OCR to convert it into searchable document.

I thought this was an oversimplification, and said so to him (her?):

In theory, sounds great. But for 3000 pages? Plus the fact that any of the OCR programs I’ve seen output raw, unformatted text, that are difficult at best to read. Plus the fact that OCR-ing usually requires some fixing up of misinterpreted text on each page. Times that by 3000.

When the Senate could, in 5 minutes, send out a reasonable version.

Well, it turns out we were both right, and were proven so by new-blog-on-the-block The Albany Project. These guys did what Mikros was talking about, with some decent OCR software, and created a searchable PDF of NY Senate pork that even keeps the overall look of the documents. Apparently there are “large amount of incorrectly recognized words in the PDF”, as I suspected, but it doesn’t get in the way of searching senators’ names.

If you want to check out the PDF, click here. It’s big, though — 76 fun-loving MegaBytes of pure, all-American, open-governmental love.

Great work, Albany Project! And motivated RT folks, check out your favorite Senator and let us know if you find anything interesting.

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Related posts:

  1. Database of NY Pork
  2. State Senate, Pork, and You: A Pathetic Primer
  3. More on Spitzer’s cutting of Pork
  4. OPB - Other People’s Blogs
  5. N.Y. Budget still includes plenty of Pork, but not for Us

2 Responses to “Pork Trek II: The Wrath of Blogs”

  1. NYBri says:

    Many thanks and hat tip to wycats at The Albany Project.

    Check out No Reform? No Raise!

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  2. bythepeople says:

    You guys are on fire! Way to rock the casbah!

    Thanks for stopping by, NYBri, and good luck next election. You wouldn’t happen to have been featured in VegNews recently, would you?

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