“FollowTheMoney” – that’s a research concept, a netherlands newsrooms name and a technical implementation of it. In this workshop we talk about the 3rd one, the toolkit around python’s “followthemoney”, originally developed by the OCCRP as the underlying foundation for Aleph. It allows data journalists and scientists working with structured data made out of entities such as Persons, Companies, and their relations. An important role plays deduplication of similar data points and detecting similarities based on statistical regression models.

Over the past years, there has been a lot of developing and extending of this tool outside of the scope of Aleph. This now allows researchers a diverse and adaptable toolchain for “FollowTheMoney” investigations (without or including Aleph). There are more tools building on top of it for scraping, transforming, deduplication, analyzing, storing and searching and even presenting or visualizing data for publications.

Due to recent work by OpenSanctions.org and investigativedata.io, the toolkit now allows creating a "data lake" with all the datasets relevant for a research group or organization. The methods allow retrieval, parsing, storing and deduplication of huge datasets, enrich them with other sources and keeping them up to date and easy to use for all kinds of investigations.

Examples of data projects using the "FollowTheMoney" stack are followthegrant.org (Tracking conflict of interests and industry influence on science), opensecuritydata.eu (companies, organizations or projects
that receive European Union security and military funding) or https://spendengerichte.correctiv.org (German court donations).

In this workshop we will give a walk through of the current tool stack, how and what to use for which tasks, and work together with the attendees on real work examples around useful datasets.