About

EIS Archives is a Northwestern University project to transform the world's largest archive of U.S. Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) into a globally accessible digital resource powered by methods in artificial intelligence that can unlock insights at a scale intractable for any single researcher.

The sample collection here features over 200 EIS documents from the Northwestern University Library Archives, on topics ranging from urban renewal, highway construction, public transit, aviation and even space exploration. Each EIS statement is accompanied by a contents page, a summary, excerpts from public comment, a list of relevant EIS documents, as well as the full EIS statement as an IIIF Manifest. A number of these documents have been used as reference materials for select exhibitions on critical themes at the intersection of the environment and the rarely told urban histories such as the ongoing push for public transit and the continued displacement of communities of color.

This project was funded by a $500,000 grant provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

What are Environmental Impact Statements?

Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) are reports mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), to assess the potential impact of actions “significantly affecting the quality of the human environment.”

Under NEPA Section 102, an EIS must analyze and disclose:

• reasonably foreseeable environmental effects of the proposed agency action;
• any reasonably foreseeable adverse environmental effects which cannot be avoided should the proposal be implemented;
• a reasonable range of alternatives to the proposed agency action, including an analysis of any negative environmental impacts of not implementing the proposed agency action in the case of a no action alternative, that are technically and economically feasible, and meet the purpose and need of the proposal;
• the relationship between local short-term uses of man’s environment and the maintenance and enhancement of long-term productivity; and
• any irreversible and irretrievable commitments of Federal resources that would be involved in the proposed agency action should it be implemented.

To this date, Northwestern University has collected more than 30,000 EIS documents which are publicly available online.

NEPA timeline: How it all started

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Canopy was created by Mat Jordan (Northwestern University) and Mark Baggett (Texas A&M University) as a method to quickly build exhibit style digital humanities projects that extend existing digital collections using IIIF Collections and Manifests. It continues to be an active open-source initiative of Northwestern University Libraries, where it supports digital scholarship in many forms. This example site is built from the Donald K. Adams and Lawrence D. Stewart Collection of Prints and the Indian Paintings on Mica collection hosted by Northwestern University Libraries' Digital Collections.

Canopy uses the IIIF Presentation API to deliver rich media from providing institutions, Markdown as MDX for authoring contextual content and layout, TailwindCSS for the user interface, and a static FlexSearch index for search. Easy aggregation and retrieval of IIIF resources is made possible by the IIIF helpers developed by Stephen Fraser. In addition, Clover IIIF, developed by Northwestern University Libraries with contributions from other institutions, is integral to Canopy and provides the rendering of IIIF resources, annotations, and metadata throughout the interface.