FREE HANDS-ON SOFTWARE DEMO & TRAINING
SEE NEW TOOLS FOR SORTING FEDERAL DOCKET MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (FDMS)
PUBLIC COMMENTS, BLOG COMMENTS AND OTHER FORMS OF ELECTRONIC PUBLIC DIALOG
What: Public Comment Analysis Toolkit (PCAT) Demo & Training Workshop
When: Friday February 12, 9:00 am
Where: Columbia Law School, Jerome Greene building, room #107
Map: http://www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/greene.html
Sponsors: The National Science Foundation and the University of
Massachusetts Amherst
Host: Dr. Stuart Shulman, Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program
at UMass Amherst
Program: During the first part, Dr. Shulman will introduce the Public
Comment Analysis Toolkit and lead the group through a series of steps to
establish accounts on the Web-based Public Comment Analysis Toolkit (PCAT).
After a brief orientation to the features in the system, all participants
will be asked to perform a series of tasks to familiarize themselves with
the scope and nature of the PCAT software. **Please bring your laptop if you
want to do a live training with Q&A.**
Why: Proliferating digitized text collections present multifaceted problems
for individuals, groups, corporations, universities, and governments at
every level. As the volume of intermixed germane and non-germane information
grows (with the latter often growing much more rapidly), the need for more
streamlined work flows and assistance from automated tools also grows. On
the individual level, the pain is concrete in the form of repetitive mouse
click-induced cases of the computer-related carpel tunnel injury.
Existing document management platforms compel users to work through lengthy
lists, sub-parts or pages of lists, and finally the individual items within
those lists with a click-by-click set of repetitive motions on the computer
mouse. Getting manually to the next document or document sub-part, isolating
the relevant text, and recording the correct classification and associated
annotations currently requires too many painful clicks and drags on the
mouse even when the number of documents is relatively small. These new tools
and technologies are based upon well-researched principles of automated text
clustering, work flow efficiency design, analytic efficacy, internal and
external validity checks, inter-coder reliability tools, and human-computer
interface usability. User feedback at this session will shape the future
direction of these tools as well as their overall usability.
Who Currently Uses PCAT? Among the first 300 PCAT BETA testers are a wide
variety of academics as well as personnel from the US Environmental
Protection Agency, the US General Services Administration, the US Fish &
Wildlife Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the
US Department of Transportation, the US Forest Service, the US Secret
Service, the US Department of Agriculture, the Federal Communication
Commission, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For More Information: Please visit http://pcat.qdap.net, write to Dr.
Shulman ([log in to unmask]), or call him at 413-545-5375.
Conflict of Interest Disclosure: Dr. Shulman is the sole inventor of the
Public Comment Analysis Toolkit and therefore he has a direct financial
interest in any future commercialization opportunities. He is the manager of
an independent software venture (Texifter, LLC) and has a financial interest
in any technology transfers from UMass to Texifter based on this research.
To Register for 9:00 am January 22:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dEplQTV6akdsczZNVkxQeHNyYW1hV3c6MA
---
This research project was initiated during the fall 1999 semester was made
possible with the following grants from the National Science Foundation:
III-0705566 "Collaborative Research III-COR: From a Pile of Documents to a
Collection of Information: A Framework for Multi-Dimensional Text Analysis,"
IIS-0429293 "Collaborative Research: Language Processing Technology for
Electronic Rulemaking," EIA-00328914 "SGER COLLABORATIVE: A Testbed for
eRulemaking Data," SES-0322662 "Democracy and E-Rulemaking: Comparing
Traditional vs. Electronic Comment from a Discursive Democratic Framework,"
and EIA-0089892 "SGER: Citizen Agenda-Setting in the Regulatory Process:
Electronic Collection and Synthesis of Public Commentary." We are also
grateful for past financial support from the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Any opinions, findings and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in these workshops are those of the
researchers and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science
Foundation or any federal agency.
--
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst
200 Hicks Way
Amherst, MA 01003
http://people.umass.edu/stu/
[log in to unmask]
413-545-5375
Editor, Journal of Information Technology and Politics
http://www.jitp.net
Director, QDAP-UMass
http://www.umass.edu/qdap/
Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government
http://www.umass.edu/digitalcenter/
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