Who would have thought a story about reading thousands of pages of archived documents could be so riveting?<p>For anyone interesting in how this task has changed, there are similar meta-stories about, as but one example, the process of analyzing the Panama Papers. The investigative collaboration sharing access to them digitized millions of pages, and ran (among other things) named entity recognition and clustering / graph discovery algorithms on them to find the signal in that particular heap of noise.<p>If you’re looking for a project exploring / learning some new technology, I can only encourage you to try to find an angle that explores some public data or document set. That could yield something far more interesting than yet another RSS or HN client.
If you enjoyed the article, I'd highly suggest "The Power Broker" by Robert Caro (the author). It's the best non-fiction book I've ever read and the only 1300 page book that I felt was too short.
Reading his description of the enormity of the research, I found myself doing a search to see what the Library looked like.<p>My first impression was that the building itself looks like a giant archive box.<p>Amazing dedication to his craft.
I spent a couple hours in the LBJ library/museum last year and Caro is certainly correct - it’s striking to see the boxes stacked for what feels like miles.
I was wondering about the "truly sordid" story on Tommy the Cork. I think it is probably this, about his trying to lobby the Supreme Court in favor of the El Paso Gas Co. monopoly: <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/12/03/lawyers-private-visit-stuns-the-supreme-court/11cb254d-fcb9-440a-870c-f0e0615cb1ee/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.cdfcaac5d422" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/12/03/l...</a>
Johnson's payola power broker lifestyle was mostly run of the mill stuff. His relationship with Bobby Baker which was open and completely insane -it would be nice to know more about this.