Creative Engineering / Tools
On The Record
A Documented Ledger of Power
A static, source-first ledger of documented corporate and political harm. Every claim links to a primary source — court filings, government reports, leaks — with a credibility status baked into the data model.
The Premise
Allegations are cheap. Records are not.
On The Record is a single-page ledger of documented corporate and political harm — bribery settlements, forced-labor rulings, climate-deception archives, surveillance contracts. The rule is simple: every entry links to a primary source, and nothing is stated more strongly than the evidence allows.
Credibility as a Data Model
The hard problem wasn't building the site — it was being honest. So the distinction between alleged and adjudicated is encoded directly into each entry's frontmatter as a status field (court ruling, settlement, warrant, report, alleged, ongoing). That status is both a visible credibility tag and a filter. The architecture itself refuses to overstate.
Build
I built it on Eleventy as a zero-database static site. Adding an entry is dropping one Markdown file into a folder — its metadata drives the section, the date sorting, and four client-side filters (topic, region, status, year) that build themselves from the content. No central list, no renumbering.
The design is deliberately analog: a samizdat newsprint aesthetic, self-hosted fonts so visitor IPs never leak to third parties, and a privacy-first contact form for tip submissions.
Why It Matters
It's an attempt to civic infrastructure web page — fast, durable, and impossible to dismiss because it never asks for trust. It just points to the record.