[OC] Reconstructing public email records into chronological message conversations

Interactive version: https://epsteinsphone.org

Opensourced Code & pipeline: https://github.com/Toon-nooT/epsteins-phone-reconstructed

This smartphone Messages-style visualization shows a reconstruction of email conversations extracted from the public Epstein estate document releases published by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The original release consists of scanned, multi-page email threads where many pages contain only a single line of actual message content, surrounded by repeated headers, footers, and quoted text. I extracted individual messages, normalized timestamps. once i had the data in this format, i created this visualization to make the data easier to understand.

Data source:
U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (2025 public document releases)

Tools used:
Python, OCR, vision-language models, SQLite, JavaScript (SQL.js), HTML/CSS (PWA)

Notes:
All data shown comes exclusively from public government documents. Extraction errors may be present. Each reconstructed message links back to its original source document for verification.