We've developed a tool to explore roughly 240,000 raw records from Recovery.gov that lets you see how American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds and jobs are distributed across federal agencies that are spending money, states that are receiving it or types of projects. You can also use the tool to focus on individual recipients of stimulus funds, tracing their subrecipients and vendors.

There are three different ways to use the tool, all of which work fine on their own or can be combined. The simplest way is to click on any of the bars at the top of the boxes in the Recovery Explorer visualization to drill down into the data. Click on Grants, for example, to make the visualization show only grants (stimulus funds distributed through contracts and loans disappear). The largest agency awarding Recovery funds through grants is the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (part of the Department of Education); click on that box to show how funds from the agency are distributed by state and type of project. Each click takes the user deeper into the data in the order specified by the Display box, below and to the left of the visualization.

That box lets you change the way Recovery Explorer slices up the data. In the default, "Grant/Contract/Loan" is the first field by the which the data is organized,then it's sliced by the second field--"Awarding agency" in the default. To change the display, drag one of the other fields to the top of the list with your mouse and click Submit. For example, bringing "Place of performance" to the top and clicking submit will display Recovery data first by state; clicking on California would then show the breakdown of Awards (contracts, grants and loans) in the Golden State.

Using the Box sizes represent control, boxes can be sized by the total dollars awarded for Recovery projects, the amount that has been spent as of the end of 2009, and the number of jobs funded by the stimulus (the White House changed the methodology from counting "saved or created jobs" to counting "jobs funded").

The Criteria box allows you to filter records manually--by the Agency awarding the money and so on (for a complete explanation of all the fields and what they correspond to in raw data from Recovery.gov, click here). The Criteria and Display boxes can be used together. If you select the Department of Energy in the Criteria box, then drag "place of performance" to the top of the Display box and click Submit, you'll see Energy's Recovery awards displayed by state.

You can jump directly to itemized records by, after imposing a few filters, clicking the "View Detail" button. The data was downloaded from Recovery.gov's cumulative file March 7, 2010. We'll update it as Recovery.gov updates its data.