The University of Minnesota Libraries’ Michael Corey –  the geospatial, technical, and data lead for Mapping Prejudice – recently received the Research and Innovation Office’s 2024 Research Technical Staff Award. 

The Research Technical Staff Award recognizes 10 U of M staff each year for their “distinguished service” to the research community and for their “exemplary leadership.” Each recipient is also awarded a $2,000 personal honorarium.

“I feel very proud to be representing the humanities on the research side and demonstrating that people in the humanities are doing high-level technical research,” Corey said. “I’m just very honored and very thankful to have great coworkers and to have the work supported here.”

Processing millions of property records

At Mapping Prejudice, Corey has designed and maintained the Dead Machine, the team’s open-source software that processes digital property records and identifies which pages are most likely to contain racial covenants. 

They’ve used the software to map more than 56,000 racial covenants in 14 communities nationwide. The team is currently getting ready to map their first county in North Carolina, testing new upgrades to the Deed Machine, and prepping for another county in California. 

“In a given county, you might have 3 to 5 million pages of records, and just setting up the system to manage that number of records is the hard part,” he explained. 

Corey works with local records custodians to gain access to these records, and after running them through the Deed Machine, volunteers review the deeds that seem to have racial covenants. By comparing volunteers’ answers, the system is able to very accurately find and map covenants. 

Some racial covenants can slip through the cracks because the team is reliant on the available records, how many have been digitized, how the records were organized and maintained, and so on. So the numbers produced by Mapping Prejudice are a conservative count.

Telling stories with maps

Before coming to Mapping Prejudice, Corey — who is from Eau Claire, Wisconsin — worked as a journalist. He started his career as an intern at the Des Moines Register, covering crime and the Iowa Legislature, while attending Drake University for his bachelor’s in journalism, with interests in religion, politics, and history. 

While he originally wanted to be a reporter, the Register hired him after graduation as a web producer, so he gradually drifted more and more into the digital side of journalism. He started learning about geospatial information when a reporter wanted to include a map alongside their story, but the website vendor would’ve charged too much. So Corey decided to figure it out himself. 

“I made it a practice that for every project I do, I’m just going to throw in some component that I don’t know how to do yet,” he said. “And that took me a really long way.”

Corey eventually moved away from the Register to work as a news applications developer and senior data editor for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. And most recently he worked at the Star Tribune as a new developer, using data visualization tools to display election results and COVID-19 data. 

“I’ve just always been fascinated by maps. I just remember being a kid and on a road trip, just staring at the atlas the entire time and figuring out, ‘Oh this is connected to that, and that’s a cool name, and now we’re this far, and what does this little mark mean, and what does this little mark mean?’” Corey said. “And it didn’t really occur to me until later that that was probably unusual. But I just always liked maps. and then came to see the ways that geospatial context can help tell so many new stories.”

‘My job is to tell the truth’

Corey heard about Mapping Prejudice while working on a story for the Star Tribune about zoning and segregation. He was impressed with the racial covenant data they had gathered and was more impressed when the team freely shared their data with him, even though it wasn’t public at the time. 

“I knew enough about the data side of it and about property records to see how difficult what they were doing was,” he explained. 

For a while, Corey had wanted to move into the history field. In journalism, all his stories relied on historical context. But he didn’t want to lose all the digital and data skills he’d spent over a decade cultivating. 

Mapping Prejudice was “a great answer” to that problem, combining his love of history, data, and journalism into one project. And at the same time, he’d become more and more convinced that housing discrimination is directly tied to modern inequalities, from wealth gaps to health outcomes. 

“The project was speaking to all of those things at the same time,” Corey said. “I’ve never felt so strongly that this was where I needed to be.”

Corey joined the team in 2021, and over the past three years, he can’t imagine a job more suited for him. It lets him interact with the community, share stories they’ve uncovered, and use his technical expertise to better tell those stories. 

“Our job is to get up every day and tell the truth, and that’s a pretty great place to be. Not everyone gets to do that. And so that’s a great privilege,” Corey said. “We don’t take for granted at Mapping Prejudice that the stuff we’re researching, there are people who would rather that we did not do that. We’ve been given a lot of freedom to do that work, and we hope that continues, and we’re very thankful for that.”