wvu-flights

Visualizing data from public records of private charter flights at West Virginia University

Overview

wvu-flights is a project that aims to make more accessible data on private charter flights by administrators at West Virginia University. The data was sourced from multiple public records requests to the University and the West Virginia State Auditor’s Office.

After compiling the relevant records via multiple WVFOIA requests, computer vision (via OpenCV) and optical character recognition (via Google Tesseract w/ pytesseract) were used to read & extract the data from dozens of flight itineraries and invoices into a structured database (SQLite). Finally, a website was built using Hugo to explore and visualize the data which was then deployed to Cloudflare Pages.

Reception

On launch, hundreds of users began exploring the data and sharing it with others. Some news outlets also picked up on flights and spending patterns of interest, which came during a time when the University was under scrutiny for certain spending practices as it closed major academic programs and cut staff for claims of a budget crisis.

To date, thousands of people have visited the site, and University administration almost immediately drastically reduced the number of in-state flights.

In the News

Questions or comments? Send an email to ~abs/wvu-flights@lists.sr.ht, or contact me directly.