 Thank you so much. Hi, I'm Harris Laparoff. I work for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which is a non-profit that defends journalists and whistleblowers through technology, advocacy, and digital security. I've been working in-house for FPF for about three years. I worked for them as a consultant for some three years before that. So I've been around for the entire lifespan of the projects that I'm talking to you about today. So quick overview of what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to tell you about the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, its history, and its purpose. I'm going to introduce you to its API, and I'm going to give you a case study on how we used our data to draw insights about press freedom violations during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In 2017, in a partnership with a couple dozen other press freedom organizations, we launched the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Its purpose is to comprehensively and systematically document aggressions against press freedom in the United States. While stories of journalists being attacked and arrested have of course been covered in the past, there was no central repository of them that we could use to answer questions like how many journalists were arrested in 2020? Is it more fewer than were arrested in 2019? Or how many journalists have been subpoenaed this year? And I think in general we've been quite successful at this goal. Our reporting is commonly cited among other places in news stories and amicus briefs and court cases. One recent example from this year, a journalist, Andrea Sahari, of the Des Moines Register went to trial after being arrested while covering a protest. And at the time that that happens, a lot of reporters turn to us and our data to find out just how common it was for journalists to actually face a criminal trial. And the answer, by the way, is that it's actually quite uncommon. Cases are usually dropped before it reaches trial. I think this was the first one since 2018, I believe. The tracker organizes incidents into 11 categories. Some of them are easier to be comprehensive than others. For example, it's pretty clear what qualifies as a leak prosecution or a journalist being arrested. But we also have categories like chilling statements which is both a little muddier and a little more expansive, where we couldn't possibly be comprehensive, but we still think it's important to cover politicians, people in power saying things that have a chilling effect on journalism. And as you can see, we do also have this catch all category for incidents that we think deserve coverage, but don't fit neatly anywhere else. So each incident that we cover is thoroughly reported by our staff in a narrative form, but we also think of the tracker as a database. And for every incident we cover, we record a bunch of structured data about it. We knew early on that we wanted to be rigorous in our reporting and provide people a reliable data set to identify trends and put particular incidents in context. So from the beginning, we've had an API through which people could use the information from our site. As you likely know, an API is a way to access data from a system, in this case the US Press Freedom Tracker. And our API in particular doubles both as a way to get an export of the complete contents of the website or to execute a query for a more specific subset of data. And it can be easily accessed through a web browser or by any automated script. So actually after four years of operation, we actually just launched a new API pretty recently. In fact, it was basically yesterday. So if there's any sloppiness in my presentation today, it's because I was waiting to see whether or not we would actually get the new API across the line before delivering it. So we did and you can find that API at the URL there at the top of the screen. You can even visit that in a web browser. Our website is powered by Django and Django REST framework, which provides a pretty nice interface for just browsing the API as a human using your web browser. If you do visit, you'll notice that that first URL is really just a holding page for listing different endpoints. Currently we only have one endpoint that supports fetching data about incidents, but we do have plans to add a categories end point that will let you fetch data about the different categories as well. So if you want to just download all of the incidents right now, you can use that second URL. It'll give you a complete dump of all the thousand plus incidents in our database. And if the default response is JSON, but if you prefer to get it in CSV, you can just add that format CSV parameter to the end. And of course, as a bonus, that'll be a much smaller file size. Our API does also support more complex queries, as I mentioned earlier. We do have some documentation for that at pressfreedomtracker.us slash data. But here's a couple examples of queries. I don't want to get too deep into it because I'm not trying to get too technical. But as you can see, you can make a query that has a date range that you want to get incidents within. You can also change which fields you're requesting. So by default, that includes all of the information, which can be quite a lot because it also includes the write ups in their complete rich text formatting. So if you don't need all that information, you can specify that you just need the title, city, and state of the incidents. If you want any more examples of queries, feel free to ask me later on in Slack or during the Q&A. So as I'm sure everyone remembers, in May of Black Steer, a Black man, George Floyd, was murdered on video by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, setting off a month of protests across the country. And while these protests were clearly a reckoning on race for the US, they were also a flash point for press freedom. In 2020, we documented a total of 517 incidents specifically at Black Lives Matter protests. And to put that in a little bit of scale, in a normal year, we document fewer than 160 incidents total. So this was an unprecedented event. Our staff worked around the clock to meticulously report and document every incident. Again, each of these is published on our website, and you can browse the website for these individual reports. But we can also put these incidents into context by charting the aggregate data. And here you can see that 2020 was a much larger year for aggressions against press freedom than any of the previous three years. And digging into 2020 specifically, you can see how the press freedom incident spike in May when the protests began and then slowly taper off, but don't return to baseline levels as the protests continue over the course of the year. This was a timeline of incidents that I created for our website, and it actually uses our API to provide quite a bit of interactivity. If you visit the site live, and I'll provide the URL a little later on, you can hover over each of those dots to get details about the specific incidents it represents. And you can also use the highlight menu at the top to call out incidents by city or who the aggressor was. And I encourage you to visit the chart and interact with it yourself, but I do want to show off one particular view of it. If you ask the dropdown to highlight incidents where the assailant was law enforcement, you can see that the majority of physical attacks on journalists during the protests were perpetrated by law enforcement officers. Here's a map of protests across the country that was actually put together using our data by a data journalist at one of our partner organizations, the committee to protect journalists. And here's a chart that I particularly like. We took the top 10 cities by number of incidents and charted them cumulatively over time. And I like that you can sort of see the narrative of how the protests escalated. They sort of started in Minneapolis in late May and then quickly spread to other cities. But I think Portland is particularly interesting to follow on this chart because you can see how a pretty steady stream of aggressions against journalists covering the protests pretty much immediately followed the deployment of Homeland Security agents to Portland. And finally, this is not specific to the Black Lives Matter protests, but I did put together this heat map of press freedom incidents over the four years of Trump's presidency starting on the day of his inauguration and ending on the day of Biden's inauguration. And you can definitely see that the Black Lives Matter protests do show up, particularly those ones from May of last year, where you have just about a week of a lot of press freedom activity and sort of continuing events over the course of the next several months. You can also see some dark spots for inauguration day in 2017, as well as election day in 2020 and January 6 when rioters stormed the Capitol. All the charts that I showed here are available online. I made them using observable notebook except for the one that was made by our partners at CPJ. And if you're a code oriented person and you haven't investigated observable notebook, I highly recommend it. It's a very, very cool system. The press freedom tracker is at pressfreedomtracker.us. If you want to use our data, if you're a journalist who has an incident to report, please get in touch with us. We're super responsive, happy to talk. If you come up with anything using our data or even just want some guidance or assistance and sifting through it, we would be happy to provide that. We want this information to be widely available, studied and reported, and we're more than happy to talk about specific quirks and how it's recorded or offer advice for analyzing it and just generally see what people do with it. And finally, feel free to find me personally on Twitter. My name is Harris Laprov. So is my Twitter handle. And now I'm happy to answer any questions people have. Thank you so much, Harris. That was a really great talk. There were a couple of slides in there that I was sort of hustling to screenshot, but perhaps I will just ask you to drop your slides in these Zinodo repository for CSP. I will absolutely upload them to Zinodo and I'll probably also post them on Twitter later today. Great. Yeah. We don't make people do that ahead of time because nobody likes that. So I have a question while the rest of the crowd might be thinking about some of their questions. I'm really curious to hear what is, when these things are happening, obviously there's never a best case scenario, but from your perspective at the freedom of the press foundation, what are the types of use that you'd like to be seeing for this data to make sure that it has the maximum impact? What are some examples of good uses? I think that's a great question. I imagine that our editors might have more of a perspective on that than me, but I do think that we imagine a lot of the use that we already see it being put to, we want to be basically the resource that you go to when something is happening with press freedom and you want to put it into context. So I gave the example of the Andrea Sahari case earlier, also just the example of seeing how unprecedented the number of press freedom violations of the protests was something that we really couldn't have put into context without this data. As a person who lives in Portland, that is an accurate slide. It was really wild here over the summer, but it sounded like whenever some pretty harrowing reports of people being picked up in vans and here. Yeah, yeah.