New York Times and GW Program on Extremism Announce ‘ISIS Files’ Research Partnership to Create a Virtual Public Archive of Internal Islamic State Group Documents

UPDATED POST (September 27, 2018) Controversy Over an ISIS Archive (New York Times and GW Program on Extremism) (via Inside Higher Ed)

From The NY Times Corp:

The Program on Extremism at the George Washington University and The New York Times announced a research partnership that will enable GW to create the virtual public archive of the newspaper’s “ISIS Files,” roughly 15,000 pages of internal Islamic State group documents retrieved in Iraq by a team of Times reporters led by foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi. The files are a collection of documents including land deeds, tax receipts, military strategies and internal regulations, which reveal the inner workings of one of history’s most deadly and well-organized terrorist groups.
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The Program on Extremism will work with The Times and GW’s Libraries and Academic Innovation division to archive, digitize and translate the documents, and publish them on an open, searchable website. The public repository will allow researchers around the world – including those in Syria and Iraq – to access a wide array of documents that provide invaluable evidence on the activities and atrocities carried out by the Islamic State group. The documents, most of which are written in Arabic, will be posted in their original form after GW conducts a thorough analysis of the documents to help ensure information that could harm civilians will not be published, as The Times did when it published many of these documents in its original reporting. The Times delivered the original documents to the Iraqi government through its embassy in Washington after the files were digitized.

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

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