Over the past few weeks, we’ve been making prototypes depicting entities and relationships in large sets of documents. Separately, we found ourselves reading more than we’d like to admit of the 312 page testimony of Glenn Simpson for the Senate Judiciary Committee, so we began deconstructing the document, using code to extract key people and places mentioned. Realizing that the testimony itself didn’t provide enough background information, we pulled in additional help to start making sense of the tangle of relationships.

We quickly found ourselves in a fairly messy data situation: Trump and Russia leading up to the 2016 election. This then went from code to drawings on the whiteboard, to more reading online, to more drawings on the whiteboard with Luke Harding’s Collusion in hand, to drawings on scraps of paper eventually assembled into a single large image.

Studio visitors this month are making a lot of jokes about pushpins and string

With some further refinement, we handcrafted a map of the key players, relationships, business deals, and meetings — at least as of March 23, 2018.

Check out the large-format poster image.