Over the last couple of months, I've been studying the Stimulus through the lens of the weekly reports published on recovery.gov.  My colleagues Erik Wilde and Eric Kansa (at the School of Information at UC Berkeley) and I made recommendations on how data feeds should be used to foster transparency around stimulus data, in addition to developing prototypes of the types of visualizations one could do with such data feeds.  We're continuing work on that front, specifically scraping data currently found in Excel and transforming that data into XML (Atom) feeds.
It is much easier to transform the financial data into visualizations and analyses, once it is in the form of feeds (rather than Excel).  The federal government should made the data in the form of XML in the first place (backed by a schema so that we can check that the data is valid), instead of making people who want to use that data scrape the data out of Excel in a highly fragile process.
To discern the meaning of the data we are extracting from various government sites, I am now trying to keep up with the news around the recovery. Here are some of the sources I've been tracking so far:
- My first stop is usually Eye on the Stimulus section of ProPublica, which according to its About Us page is "an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest." There's so much great material on the site that deserves an in-depth description. For instance, I've relied heavily on The Stimulus Plan: A Detailed List of Spending to get an overall pictures of where money is supposed to be going.
- I only realized this morning that ProPublica's stimulus coverage is part of ShovelWatch, a partnership for "Tracking the Stimulus From Bills to Buildings" consisting of ProPublica and two sister organizations The Takeaway (a "new national morning news program") and WNYC.
- The New York Times has extensive coverage at its topic page Economic Stimulus.
- I will start tracking stories matching the search term "recovery or stimulus" on Google News.
- I like to listen to NPR's coverage of the stimulus or recovery.
- Of course, there the news section of recovery.gov itself — which is naturally missing any critical commentary.
This list represents my current starting points. I naturally expect to find a lot of other useful sources as I go along.
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