Reckoning with the Toxic Past: the IT Revolution and Once-secret Corporate Records

Mass tort litigation has unleashed millions of pages of once-secret documents from the vaults of companies like Du Pont, BP, and Monsanto, among others. It allows researchers and community health activists to learn about the internal deliberations and workings of companies as they confronted toxic risks of their products. Yet the sheer volume of material -- millions of unsorted pages -- poses obvious challenges. This presentation will discuss the development of a new resource, ToxicDocs.org, its holdings, and new tools being developed to work through them. It will end by talking briefly about implications for environmental health activism and policy.