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U of T hackathon to save climate data before Trump presidency brings "overwhelming reaction"

photo of media scrum
History and Women and Gender Studies Professor Michelle Murphy speaks to the media during U of T's hackathon to archive potentially at-risk environmental data (all photos by Geoffrey Vendeville)

The calls and emails began to pour in soon after three U of T researchers announced they would host a hackathon to preserve U.S. environmental data before it might be deleted by the Trump administration. 

The , Vice,  to name only a few, reported on the U of T effort to rescue information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website. The 鈥済uerilla archiving event鈥 was even mentioned in Stephen Colbert鈥檚 opening monologue on The Late Show.

鈥淚n Toronto, experts will copy irreplaceable public data and compile a website to harbor scientific information,鈥 Colbert said, quoting . 鈥淭hat鈥檚 right,鈥 he continued, 鈥渋t鈥檚 gotten so bad even facts are moving to Canada.鈥

The reaction was 鈥渙verwhelming,鈥 said Patrick Keilty, one of the organizers and an assistant professor in U of T鈥檚 Faculty of Information. 鈥淭his is an urgent issue and people obviously care passionately about it. I think that鈥檚 a very hopeful sign.鈥 

Organizers said about 150 people came to the event in the Claude T. Bissell building adjoining Robarts Library on Saturday. They hunkered down at computers helping to mark vulnerable programs and data on the EPA website for safekeeping.


Hannah Jones (left) and Tori Lions (right) were glued to their laptops, helping store EPA data for posterity.

The hacktivists said the climate data is in danger because president-elect Donald Trump has called global warming a 鈥渉oax,鈥 tapped a climate sceptic to head the EPA and threatened to scrap the agency.

The tech-savvy volunteers worked with Matt Price, a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Information, on code to scrape data from government websites. Without this data, Price said, it would be hard to make informed decisions about environmental policy.

鈥淎 democratic system has a lot of weaknesses,鈥 he said. 鈥淲e make up for those weaknesses by supporting reasoned argument and open access to evidence. When we lose those things, democracy is in trouble.鈥 


A U of T sessional instructor in the Faculty of Information led a group of coders at the hackathon

The information was stored in the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library of web pages, software, text and images.The U of T hackathon was part of the Internet Archive鈥檚 End of Term project, which began in 2008 to harvest information that was in danger of disappearing between presidential transitions.

With reams of data to record and a month before inauguration day, time is running out to preserve decades of scholarship, said Michelle Murphy, director of U of T鈥檚 and a professor of history and women and gender studies. 

鈥淚t鈥檚 a race against time,鈥 Murphy said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not necessarily like it鈥檚 going to happen on Jan. 20th, but I think we鈥檙e going to see changes by Feb. 20th.鈥 

In addition to seeding thousands of URLs to the Internet Archive鈥檚 End of Term web crawler, including 192 at-risk programs and data sets, the volunteers made a toolkit with a list of best practices for storing mountains of information. They hoped to set a precedent for academics planning similar events in the U.S. including one at the University of Pennsylvania on Jan. 13. 

Patricia Kim, a PhD candidate in the environmental humanities program at U Penn, came to the hackathon to take notes for her own school鈥檚 event.

鈥淲hat鈥檚 great about this 重口味SM and Penn collaborative effort is that it drives home the point that climate and the environment don鈥檛 have borders,鈥 she said. 

The U of T researchers aren鈥檛 stopping at last weekend鈥檚 hackathon. They plan to monitor the EPA website after Trump comes into office to report any changes as soon as possible and to publish a report online about the new administration鈥檚 first 100 days. 

Sam-chin Li, a reference/government publications librarian at U of T, said it made sense for U of T to take the lead in archiving efforts because it has experience archiving Canadian government websites and has one of the top library systems in North America. 

鈥淭here鈥檚 not much we can do about our neighbour鈥檚 election results,鈥 she said, 鈥渂ut that doesn鈥檛 mean we should sit by and do nothing.鈥

Read more about the organizers behind the hackathon

 

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