Assogba, Ros, & McKeon on DocBlocks: Communication-Minded Visualization of Topics in U.S. Congressional Bills

Yannick Assogba, Irene Ros, and Matt McKeon, all of the IBM Research Visual Communication Lab, presented DocBlocks: Communication-Minded Visualization of Topics in U.S. Congressional Bills, at CHI 2010: The 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held 10-15 April 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Here is the abstract:

US Federal legislation is a hot topic for discussion and advocacy on the web. Yet legislative bills present a significant challenge for both experts and average citizens to navigate and understand. To explore solutions to this problem, we have created DocBlocks: a prototype visualization and website that enables users to explore the content of congressional bills and communicate their findings to others. Our technique enables us to take any document from a categorized corpus, classify its sections, and visualize its topic structure. With the launch of this service, we hope to provide a valuable tool for open governance and learn from our users at this critical intersection of visualization, advocacy, social software, and civil society.

DockBlocks appears to be implemented in an application currently called IBM Many Bills: A Visual Bill Explorer.

HT @kegill.

Kinnaird, Romero, & Abowd on Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight

Peter Kinnaird, Mario Romero, and Professor Gregory Abowd, all of the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, have posted Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight, a paper presented at CHI 2010: The 28th ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held 10-15 April 2010, in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Here is the abstract:

Strong representative democracies rely on educated, informed, and active citizenry to provide oversight of the government. We present Connect 2 Congress (C2C), a novel, high temporal-resolution and interactive visualization of legislative behavior. We present the results of focus group and domain expert interviews that demonstrate how different stakeholders use C2C for a variety of investigative activities. The evaluation provided evidence that users are able to support or reject claims made by candidates and conduct freeform, low-cost, exploratory analysis into the legislative behavior of representatives across time periods.

Click here for more information on Connect 2 Congress.