https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3666-2781Contribution to Project: Josh Dowdy has years of experience analyzing and extracting relevant information from large volumes of textual data, comprising a variety of sources and languages. He has created, curated, and maintained pivotal databases and procedures to meet the requirements of various tasks, including topic modeling, document clustering, and anomaly detection. Dowdy’s expertise, gained from working in an industry where customers rely on the results of advertised products, was instrumental in this project, as he prepared the COPE-ID dataset for integration into the tool and configured the tool to support similar datasets in the future. Furthermore, he developed all backend functionality and integrated Elasticsearch, which enables tool users to search for a variety of terms, topics, and sources across the millions of documents in this dataset within milliseconds. During the completion of this project, he worked closely with Chris Lightsey and Jacob Adams to establish a normalized data structure for the database’s documents, ensuring quality and accuracy in retrieval and reporting.
