delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this piece, the investigative reporter Ian Urbina describes two new technologies that made a daunting reporting job easier.

A whistle-blower gave me hundreds of hours of surreptitiously recorded phone conversations that revealed potential wrongdoing at the power plant where he worked.

Hundreds of hours. How could I possibly listen to all of the recordings and make any sense of them?

More daunting still: I’d gathered thousands of pages of documents (corporate earnings statements, internal emails, company news releases, local news coverage, Security and Exchange Commission filings, and reports from state regulators). Was there a way to organize this material so I could easily spot the most important content?

These were some of the challenges involved in reporting for Tuesday’s paper about an innovative but troubled power plant being built in Kemper County, Miss.

The project occupies a central role in the Obama administration’s plans to counter climate change and has been heralded as a poster child for the promise of so-called clean coal. The plant would deploy new technology to superheat coal, would remove most of its carbons and other harmful pollutants and was to be a showcase for local ingenuity and engineering savvy. Many energy experts think the kind of carbon-capture technology that the Kemper plant uses will enable countries around the world to reach last year.

But the Kemper power plant is still not online. Instead, it is more than two years past deadline and more than $4 billion over budget. The plant’s owner faces credit downgrades, multiple lawsuits and an investigation by the S.E.C.

A holy grail for every president since Ronald Reagan, clean coal and carbon-capture technology promise a way to make electricity by . Producing roughly 45 percent of the emissions that cause climate change, coal is a dirty fuel source. Yet the world still relies on it for power, with more than 25 percent of the electricity used globally coming from coal plants, as it starts shifting to more renewable sources of energy.

A close look at the Kemper project’s troubles offered insight into the necessity — and danger — of federal subsidies. It also showed the conflicts created by our competing energy and environmental priorities.

It also raised some thorny questions: Did the plant’s owner intentionally mislead the public, investors and regulators about the cost and timetable of the project? Why have 23 of the poorest counties in the country been saddled with costs connected to the most expensive power plant in American history? What does this fraught power plant say about the financial feasibility of carbon-capture technology and its prospects for helping to slow global warming?

I was fairly confident that, if I could only organize them properly, the thousands of documents I had compiled would offer useful insights.

Two online tools proved enormously helpful. VoiceBase is a relatively new transcription site that converts audio into written transcripts. I could skim transcripts far more quickly than I could listen to all those hours of conversation, and this tool made it much easier to pinpoint useful information. In the end, I listened to all the conversations to check that the transcriptions were accurate.

A new website called , which is partly funded by The New York Times Company, allows users to create visual and interactive timelines. The site enables users to build annotated timelines that incorporate a variety of documents, videos, audio, and social media posts. We used The History Project to build a page called that drew from an array of raw documents and multimedia materials. This was especially helpful to me because it was difficult to keep straight so many different sources of information.

In a given week, what did the company say in a news release or earnings call on the one hand, and in recorded phone calls or internal emails on the other? How long after the company asked for permission to continue their project did it reveal that they were far more in debt than previously disclosed? The History Project made it easier to keep track of all this.

I also wanted to track subtle changes in how company officials described the project and its mission over time. There was a steady upward creep in the project’s cost, for instance; evolving explanations for delays; accumulating warnings from engineers; and the transition in the prevailing public perception of the project from hope to skepticism. The whistle-blower’s perspective also evolved.

When it was published, the timeline included more than 30,000 words, or about 65 pages worth of annotations to help readers understand why each document in the file was significant.

As I get more documents — there are nearly a dozen open-records requests pending that were sent months ago to federal and state agencies — they will be added to the collection. The timeline also offers an interactive feature which allows readers to focus on documents tied to one theme. It highlights various issues over time: Were there early warnings about this fraught project? What was the company’s view? Who should pay for the cost overruns?

The History Project and VoiceBase made what might have been an overwhelming task manageable. The new technologies helped me hone in on the right questions and trace them through time. They also helped make the publishing of these documents more interactive, by allowing readers to dive into the archives for themselves.