https://civicmediaclass.mit.edu/2015/03/17/civic-data-analysis/ Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:23:05 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.2 https://civicmediaclass.mit.edu/2015/03/17/civic-data-analysis/#comment-69 Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:23:05 +0000 http://civic-media-class.wordpress.brownbag.me/?p=431#comment-69 In some ways, this project is similar to what Yu is proposing around civic coding projects but instead (http://civicmediaclass.mit.edu/2015/03/17/delicious-for-civic-coding/) focuses on the aggregation and analysis of civic data. The Sunlight Foundation has a long history of working to open and generate datasets of public interest (http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/). My question for you would be too look closely at those projects and the documentation and news reports around them and try to understand what’s missing from their approach. I also want you to think deeply and look for evidence of your claim that their is a strong interest in citizens analyzing data for themselves to draw original conclusions. I would argue that one of the biggest challenges to the rhetoric of the open data movement has been that lack of interest in using that data. More efforts are trying to argue that this simply requires easier to use tools like Socrata, which sells open data portals to local governments. The other place you should investigate is the annotation community. This is still unsolved problem for texts broadly speaking. Look at tools like Annotation Studio from MIT (http://www.annotationstudio.org/) and hypothes.is (http://hypothes.is/). OpenCongress from Sunlight has some of these features though very rudimentary around congressional lawmaking.

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