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Why the Federal Register Is the Most Important Publication in America Right Now
It is not often you see a headline that is so documents-specific as this:
- Bush's Bureaucratic Dark Arts: Why the Federal Register Is the Most Important Publication in America Right Now, by Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive, Posted on Alternet, August 23, 2008.
Text Visualization Tools
What would it be like if we had true open access to large quantities of government text? We would be able to do much more than retrieve a page of the Congressional Record and read it. Researchers would be able to analyze the text and create new, innovative ways of discovering, browsing, searching, and reading text-based information. Clifford Lynch has written eloquently about this in the realm of scholarly literature (Clifford A. Lynch, "Open Computation: Beyond Human-Reader-Centric Views of Scholarly Literatures," Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Neil Jacobs Ed., Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2006, pp. 185-193.). I was reminded of these issues this morning when looking at Visualization Strategies: Text & Documents on Tim Showers Web Design Blog (August 20th, 2008). Tim lists more than a dozen examples of techniques and tools. One of my favorites is the visualization of the 2008 Democratic primary debates offered by the New York Times. You can hear the debate, search for keywords and see where they appear, browse a transcript, and more. Shouldn't we have free, open, access to large bodies of all government texts (not just search-and-retrieve access to bits-and-pieces) so that we can easily create corpora that can be indexed, browsed, and analyzed? Thanks and a tip of the hat to Tim Dennis! Continue reading
Political Fundraising? It’s Party Time!
The Sunlight Foundation has launched a new web site, Party Time!, which aims to document the political party circuit -- not "political parties" as in "GOP" and "Democratic," but parties as in champagne, food, golf... and money: "the social whirl surrounding politicians in their quests to raise cash to run their campaigns." There is a searchable database that lets you track parties thrown at the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions as well as fundraising activities by all lawmakers running for Congress that happen all year round going back to 2006. Continue reading
SEC To Replace EDGAR With ‘IDEA’
SEC To Replace EDGAR With 'IDEA', by K.C. Jones, InformationWeek, Aug. 19, 2008. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intends to supplement its aging EDGAR system and eventually replace it with a new one called Interactive Data Electronic Applications (Idea). It hopes to make Internet searches about publicly held companies and mutual funds simpler and more comprehensive and make data easier to downloaded to spreadsheets, entered in databases, and compared.
The SEC said the move would allow it to transition from collecting forms and documents to making the information freely available to investors. The new system should also provide current information in a format that is easy to access, collate, sift through, and compile into new reports. Most SEC filings have used the Edgar format, which has limited investors and others who want to examine information about public companies to viewing one form at a time.Continue reading
Presidential Signing Statements
The Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Armed Services Committee issued a report on Presidential signing statements: Findings of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations in Support of the Full Committee re: Presidential Signing Statements (PDF, 4 pages). It is also available here from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy, which describes the report here: White House Signing Statements “Unsubstantiated,” Report Says, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, August 20, 2008. The Subcommittee held hearings on signing statements ("Testimony on the impact of the Presidential signing statement on the Department of Defense’s implementation of the Fiscal Year 2008 National Defense Authorization Act) on March 11, 2008. Prepared statements and audio transcripts are available on the Committee's hearing information page. (Nothing is available from GPO Access yet, apparently.) Also see: Essential Reading About Signing Statements (which includes links to audio files of the hearings from hascaudio.house.gov, but which I had no success in loading) and News About Signing Statements maintained by Joyce A. Green. Just browsing around this important topic and trying to find a single, reliable link to all the information from the government is a good demonstration how far we have to go to get good access to government information. Continue reading
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