Title: Rescued From Obscurity: 11,439 Stories of Life and Death in Chicago
Year: 2007
Publisher: The Chicago Tribune
Author: David Thigpen
Issue: January 21, 2007
Description: For decades the large leather-trimmed volumes sat in the recesses of the archives of the Chicago Police Department, with nary a visitor. Then in the summer of 1998, researcher Leigh Buchanan Bienen spotted an article by Tribune reporter Charles Madigan describing the volumes and their contents: detailed records of every murder in the city between 1870 and 1930, and thus began a 6-year odyssey transforming the handwritten records into a dataset, then a robust interactive database-centric website, Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930, containing the murder chronicles and a staggering amount of other data.
