Over the past year, HAIL has worked with the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission (CHFC) in developing a new web application. CHFC has vast datasets both on paper and on dated platforms such as Microsoft Access or Kaseware dating back to the organization's founding in 1904. The Data Explorer aims to make this data more accessible to promote CHFC's values of altruism and peace. This article is the first in a series that will explore the layers of the Data Explorer prior to its planned public release this fall.
Data
The first and most significant roadblock to creating the application was migrating the data to a clean and usable format. CHFC was most recently using Kaseware, a platform used by law enforcement to track and map people and factors to a case. With CHFC's data, it would map heroes, victims, witnesses, locations, and more to the actual event of a heroic act. Older data was stored on Microsoft Access, an older database platform with a similar layout, albeit with fewer data fields and columns. Both sources were far from clean, with empty and incorrectly formatted lines throughout, requiring a months-long data cleaning process.
With the high data complexity, the Data Explorer platform uses a multi-tiered object-oriented system. Heroic Acts, People, Locations, Organizations, Emails, and Artifacts are stored as objects with text and numeric fields within them.
| act.yaml | id, filing_number, title, summary, date, award_date, progression, status, legacy_file_numbers, legacy_id, categories, locations, persons (through ActPerson) |
For example, shown above is the "act" object formatting, representing a heroic act. It has thirteen individual fields representing all aspects as stored by CHFC. This means that acts can be connected to another object such as people, which would then store information about the people. This format emphasizes the connections between each layer, making it intuitive for the platform we are designing.
Platform Interface
The current design of the Data Portal is built around the object-oriented system. Users can explore by hero or by acts, with the location being prominently displayed to create user connection with the heroes and acts. Selecting a hero or act on the left sidebar will display all the fields pertaining to the object including stories and artifacts such as pictures and documents. Users can also search the repository with keywords allowing any object to be found easily.
Impact
The Carnegie Hero Fund Data Explorer has the potential to transform how one of America's oldest humanitarian archives is accessed and understood. The project opens this rich dataset to researchers, educators, journalists, and the general public. The object-oriented design reveals meaningful connections between heroes, victims, locations, and events, enabling new ways to study patterns of altruism across time and geography. Making this data widely accessible ensures that the stories of everyday heroes are preserved and celebrated for generations to come.
Written by Shanker Pillai