Environmental Archives for Everyone
Building a Public Access Platform
Northwestern University has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to transform the world's largest archive of U.S. Environmental Impact Statements into a globally accessible digital resource. This collection contains 48,280 federal documents (3.5 million pages) capturing five decades of debates between government agencies, corporations, and affected communities about major environmental projects, from highway construction to nuclear facilities. These documents hold crucial evidence about how environmental decisions have been justified, who benefited, who bore the costs, and which voices were heard or silenced.
The challenge? These records remain difficult to access digitally. While Northwestern has digitized many documents, we face hurdles for discovery and use. Limited metadata means you can’t easily search by location or project type. There’s no way to explore thematic connections across documents or visualize patterns over time and geography. For most users, finding relevant materials in this massive collection is a needle in a haystack search.
This Knight Lab studio project will build the public-facing website that transforms this archive from an overwhelming pile of PDFs into an engaging, navigable resource. Think less “searchable database” and more “digital exhibit,” or a platform that guides users through curated environmental narratives while enabling independent exploration across multiple pathways. You’ll design discovery tools, create interactive visualizations, develop geospatial interfaces, and ensure the platform serves everyone from high school students researching local environmental history to investigative journalists tracking toxic exposure at military bases to community advocates seeking evidence of environmental racism.
We’re building this on Northwestern’s Canopy platform, an innovative library-led initiative for creating visually rich, narrative-driven digital exhibits. Your work will determine how people interact with fifty years of environmental policy archives. What does it mean to make government documents engaging? How do you help a journalist quickly find all EIS documents about a specific geographic region? How do you enable a student to trace how communities resisted highway construction across different decades? How do you make technical maps and diagrams accessible to non-experts?
This studio project is part of the public platform development workstream of our Mellon grant, working directly with library partners, GIS specialists, and environmental journalism faculty. All students will be co-authors on publications resulting from this work, documenting innovations in digital archive design and their implications for public access to environmental policy records.
Faculty and Staff Leads
Project Details
2026 Winter
Important Questions
- How do we design interfaces that serve both academic researchers conducting systematic analysis and community activists seeking specific local evidence?
- What visualization and discovery tools make millions of pages of technical government documents accessible and engaging for non-specialist audiences?
- How can geospatial interfaces reveal patterns of environmental decision-making across time, geography, and affected communities?
- What does it mean to build a digital archive as a public exhibit rather than a database, by balancing curated narratives with flexible exploration?
- How do we surface the often-overlooked voices of impacted communities buried within bureaucratic environmental assessments?
Sample Milestones
- Weeks 1-2: Explore existing environmental archives and data platforms. Begin hands-on exploration of Northwestern's Canopy platform and meet with library partners.
- Weeks 3-4: Develop user personas and journey maps for different audiences. Create wireframes and initial interface concepts for discovery tools, search functionality, and exhibit features. Work directly with library partners to understand the archive's structure, metadata capabilities, and technical constraints.
- Weeks 5-7: Build interactive prototypes focusing on discovery tools, geographic visualization, timeline navigation, and accessibility features. Develop curated exhibit concepts highlighting key environmental cases and their historical significance. Iterate based on user testing with representative audiences.
- Weeks 8-9: Refine production-ready interface designs and visual storytelling elements. Integrate with Canopy platform and geospatial capabilities. Coordinate with Elizabeth Shogren's investigative journalism students who will field-test the platform for real-world reporting projects.
- Week 10: Finalize platform specifications, conduct comprehensive user testing, and prepare handoff documentation for technical implementation. Create case studies demonstrating how different user groups interact with environmental archives. Present work at Knight Lab showcase and draft manuscripts for publication.
Outcome
Complete platform design for an exhibit-style website; create UX documentation including personas, journey maps, wireframes, and interface guidelines; develop exhibit concepts that balance narrative clarity with flexible exploration; guide users through key environmental cases while maintaining flexibility for independent exploration across multiple research pathways; contribute to co-authored publications in digital humanities and information science journals.