Newsvine's DC Madam Record Parser Is Up And Running

Photo by Steve Jurvetson. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

The DC Madam's phone list consists of literally years of records, thousands of lines, and untold calls. As you read this bloggers around the globe are pouring over these scanned pages. The loose-knit community at Reddit, a popular social news site and potential rival of industry giant Digg , has begun a project to convert the haphazard graphical scans into cleaner text documents. From there, the real work begins -- meticulously tracking down and identifying the owner of the thousands of numbers that trace back through the years, spelling out a sordid tale of sex in the halls of power.

Newsvine, has also joined the fray, and has attempted to leverage its much closer knit community and users groups to assemble a dedicated team to work the bulk of these numbers. But even with a well organized group, the sheer volume of records may prove a daunting task. In a community constructed upon computed networks and connected through them, it seems more than a bit out of place that one of the largest Crowdsourcing attempts in Internet history is being accomplished largely by hand. Automation is in order.

Today this column, in partnership with Newsvine, is pleased to launch what, with luck, will become one of the first steps towards a massive automation of the DC Madam Crowdsourcing. The Quick Phone Record Parse and Lookup (Q-PRPL - "Q-Purple") Application allows users to submit scanned text transcriptions of the DC Madam phone records for automated parsing and reverse 411lookup. Used in conjunction with the ongoing OCR project at Reddit, Q-PRPL should help speed the process of decoding the DC Madam's records.

What You Can Do With It

QPRPL will allow users to upload a list of ten digit phone numbers for reverse 411 lookup. The application will parse the list, extract the phone numbers, and return links to any numbers with existing reverse 411 information. The result is a much faster means of digging through the existing DC Madam records. Though many of the numbers are wireless or unlisted, and thus can not be fetched via reverse-411, those that can be are much easier identified with the tool.

Try it out here

Users may find text copies of the phone records at the Reddit Goes To DC Wiki (password: "reddit") thanks to the ongoing work of the Reddit community. Please keep in mind that the information yielded by the Reddit Goes To DC project and Q-PRPL may not be 100% accurate. Users should take caution when reporting the results of a Q-PRPL query and should verify the number manually against the original scanned images to ensure accuracy. Make no mistake, accusations of cavorting with a prostitute can ruin a persons' life. Even solid and authenticated hits ought to draw a pause -- is this information important enough to the public at large to warrant its disclosure?

Issues and Limitations

Q-PRPL is a project under development and has two primary weaknesses.

First, Q-PRPL is bandwidth intensive. As the enormity of a complete US phone book defies description, Q-PRPL uses existing reverse 411 services to look up the phone numbers it extracts. Those requests amount to a large and potentially sustained volume of traffic, making private hosting difficult at best for the project. Newsvine's kind assistance in this matter thus makes the Q-PRPL software publicly available without the need for users to host the script themselves. Database enhancements are planned for the Q-PRPL engine to improve performance, but due to hardware limitations these may appear in a later release.

Second, Q-PRPL is unable to fetch wireless, unlisted, or very old phone numbers. No existing free reverse 411 solution exists in for wireless numbers and unlisted numbers are, as their name implies, also difficult to reverse lookup. As such, Q-PRPL returns "Wireless" and "Unlisted" when it encounters numbers without adequate data. The proliferation of mobile phones, particularly inside the beltway, is evident in returns from Q-PRPL. As this is a preliminary release of Q-PRPL unlisted and wireless numbers are simply not addressed in this version. Depending on the success of the project and other concerns, Q-PRPL may eventually incorporate a social component to further refine these initial and limited results. In the event that this extension is undertaken, Newsvine will again be instrumental in its success.

Caveats

Please use Q-PRPL responsibly. Do not harass or otherwise inconvenience individuals whose names or addresses may be presented by or through Q-PRPL. Q-PRPL's information is not necessarily 100% accurate and should be taken with a grain of salt. Numerous opportunities for corruption from errors in scanning, OCR, and number extraction to outdated listings and changed phone numbers make reverse-411 on the DC Madam records difficult at best. To that end, diligence and decorum are of the utmost importance.

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Crowdsourcing the "D.C. Madam" List

Corey Spring

Tue Jul 10

71