Many bills: engaging citizens through visualizations of congressional legislation

Authors:
Yannick Assogba;Irene Ros;Joan DiMicco;Matt McKeon
Affiliations:
IBM, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;IBM, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;IBM, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA;Google, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
2011

Citing 12
Cited 0

TileBars: visualization of term distribution information in full text information access

CHI '95 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Compus: visualization and analysis of structured documents for understanding social life in the 16th century

DL '00 Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Digital libraries
ThemeRiver: Visualizing Thematic Changes in Large Document Collections

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Visualizing the non-visual: spatial analysis and interaction with information from text documents

INFOVIS '95 Proceedings of the 1995 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization
Exploring erotics in Emily Dickinson's correspondence with text mining and visual interfaces

Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
Discovering interesting usage patterns in text collections: integrating text mining with visualization

Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management
Jigsaw: supporting investigative analysis through interactive visualization

Information Visualization
The Word Tree, an Interactive Visual Concordance

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Literature Fingerprinting: A New Method for Visual Literary Analysis

VAST '07 Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology
Participatory Visualization with Wordle

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Document Cards: A Top Trumps Visualization for Documents

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
Connect 2 congress: visual analytics for civic oversight

CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.01

Visualization

Abstract

US federal legislation is a common subject of discussion and advocacy on the web, inspired by the open government movement. While the contents of these bills are freely available for download, understanding them is a significant challenge to experts and average citizens alike due to their length, complex language, and obscure topics. To make these important documents more accessible to the general public, we present Many Bills (http://manybills.us): a web-based set of visualization tools that reveals the underlying semantics of a bill. Using machine learning techniques, we classify each bill's sections based on existing document-level categories. We then visualize the resulting topic substructure of these bills. These visualizations provide an overview-and-detail view of bills, enabling users to read individual sections of a bill and compare topic patterns across multiple bills. Through an overview of the site's user activity and interviews with active users, this paper highlights how Many Bills makes the tasks of reading bills, identifying outlier sections in bills, and understanding congressperson's legislative activity more manageable.