Students Present Work on Flint Water Crisis Email Accessibility

On Wednesday, May 5, a team of undergraduate students presented their work analyzing emails that pertain to the Flint Water Crisis. 

This project will increase the accessibility of a unique and important publicly-available set of emails on the Flint Water Crisis released by Michigan’s then-governor Rick Snyder. In early 2016, Snyder published a large archive (around 455,000 PDF pages) of emails related to the crisis sent to and from staff from multiple state government agencies. 

Guided by Dr. Louise Seamster, this class is supporting the University of Iowa’s Flint Email Lab by making the contents of the email archive easily searchable to members of the public, especially affected communities. Students this semester are helping develop tools for working with the data. They have also created initial analyses of its contents, to support big-data methodological approaches. Read more about the project in IowaNow. 

The recording of the presentation is below.

Research Team:

• Sarah Berkowitz 
• Isaac Bills 
• Theodore Byrnes 
• Marissa Good 
• Allison Meyer 
• Terry Saul III 
• Darshaun Smith 
• Allyson Stoops 
• Hannah Zadeh