Transparency for All

Using Artificial Intelligence to help people navigate large datasets.

 
 

About Gumshoe x_

Gumshoe x_ is an interdisciplinary collaboration between sociologist Dr. Mona Sloane and journalist Hilke Schellmann. Born out of a joint interest in the social impact of AI systems, Gumshoe x_ advances projects that examine artificial intelligence’s (AI) role in society, and that use AI innovation in the public interest. 

Our core project is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool called Gumshoe. Gumshoe identifies the relationship between relevant and irrelevant sections in large text corpora. Gumshoe was designed to help journalists hold the powerful accountable.

The Gumshoe prototype was developed in 2021 by Dhara Mungra, Kelsey Markey, Lauren D’Arinzo, and Alene Rhea as a NYU Center for Data Science Capstone project. Hilke Schellmann and Mona Sloane were Capstone clients and Julia Stoyanovich served as Capstone faculty mentor. 

Other Gumshoe x_ projects are currently in the making—stay tuned!

Gumshoe x Muckrock

Gumshoe x_ is collaborating with MuckRock—an open source platform used by tens of thousands of journalists across 4,000 newsrooms to file Freedom of Information requests and store their documents. Our collaboration will  integrate Gumshoe into MuckRock’s document cloud platform to help users analyze and surface relevant sections in public documents. The effort will unlock decades of valuable information, data and history contained in government records released under the Freedom of Information Act. 

Independent journalists and under-resourced newsrooms will receive a Gumshoe support package that is designed to create equity across the board: access to Gumshoe x MuckRock, bespoke support through the MuckRock services and team

MuckRock’s team of  investigative editors and data journalists will work closely with these underserved newsrooms and independent journalists, training them on how to best use FOIA to get documents in the first place and then to use Gumshoe to analyze the information they get back. Through MuckRock, the team will be able to offer microgrants to small newsrooms and freelance journalists to provide an equitable approach and pay an honorarium for their feedback on the tool and its implementation process. 

This close collaboration will enable the Gumshoe x MuckRock team to iteratively improve the Gumshoe backend as well as the integration with MuckRock, and to conduct cutting-edge research on large data sets.

Sign up for Gumshoe Beta Testing

Interested in using this platform as an independent journalist or in your newsroom?

Sign up for beta testing here.

 

Team

Hilke Schellmann
 

Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy-award-winning journalism professor at New York University and a freelance reporter covering artificial intelligence (AI). She is currently writing a book on AI and the future of work for Hachette. Using innovative multimedia and machine learning-based tools, she focuses her reporting on unearthing systemic wrongdoing and its impact on vulnerable people. Schellmann’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, VICE, HBO, PBS, TIME, ARD, ZDF, WNYC, National Geographic, Glamour, MIT Technology Review and The Atlantic. Prior to joining NYU, Schellmann was the Director of Video Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Follow her on Twitter @hilkeschellmann

Mona Sloane

Mona Sloane, Ph.D. is a sociologist working on design and inequality, specifically in the context of AI design and policy. She is Faculty at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, a Senior Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Responsible AI, a Fellow with NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) and The GovLab, and the Director of the *This Is Not A Drill* program on technology, inequality and the climate emergency at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is principal investigator on multiple research projects on AI and society, and holds an affiliation as postdoctoral scholar with the Tübingen AI Center at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Mona founded and runs the IPK Co-Opting AI series at NYU and currently serves as editor of the technology section at Public Books. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Follow her on Twitter @mona_sloane

Collaborators

  • Michael Morisy is MuckRock’s Chief Executive and Cofounder. He was previously an editor at the Boston Globe, where he launched the paper's technology vertical BetaBoston. He was a 2018-19 nonresidential fellow at Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. He was a 2014-15 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University and a 2012-13 Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Network Fellow at Harvard University. He graduated in 2007 from Cornell University with a degree in English.

  • is Muckrock’s Cofounder, Lead Developer and Site Architect. He is a veteran of multiple technology companies and startups, including AMD, Achronix, and eProvenance. He graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2007, and earned a Master's Degree from Cornell in 2008.

  • Dara Munghra is a Data Scientist at the Center for Data Science at New York University.