whatisinhere.com
What is in here?
Public data is released in amounts too big to read and too unfamiliar to search. This site is about the step before search: seeing what is in the pile.
The problem
Every year more data is made public than anyone reads. Records releases, open-data portals, court filings and document dumps arrive as thousands of files at once, often scanned and rarely labelled.
The usual way in is a search box. A search box only answers questions you already know how to ask. If you don't know that a school was tested for asbestos, or that a tenant wrote in about the dust, you won't type those words. So most of what is in a release is never found, not because it is hidden, but because nobody knew to look for it.
What this site is for
Here we take real releases and build ways into them that anyone can use, with no training in data. Each one tries to do the same few things:
- Show what is there before asking you to search. What kinds of documents, how many of each, where and when they are from.
- Let you follow one thing. A place, a person or a month, wherever it turns up.
- Keep the original close. Every point leads back to the page it came from, so nothing has to be taken on trust.
- Say what isn't known. Scans are misread and records are incomplete; the pages say so where it matters.
The first case
Case 1 ยท 2026
The NYC 9/11 environmental records
On September 8, 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released the City's own records about the air, the dust and the cleanup in Lower Manhattan after September 11: more than 170,000 pages, much of it paper found in boxes the year before. They went online as 24,436 documents (letters, building files, laboratory printouts, emails, hotline notes) behind a search box. Here they are laid out as six questions you can open and zoom into: what is in here, where, when, what was tested for, who wrote to whom, and what people asked for.
Explore the 9/11 records →How this was built, version by version: the talk and its earlier drafts.
An independent reading of the City of New York's September 11 document portal, not affiliated with the City. Text was read by OCR from page images, and every document links back to the portal.
More cases will follow, each a different kind of release.