(This new seeding project has just been accepted for funding from the Institute for Broadband Enabled Society (IBES) at the University of Melbourne. Led by VeRSI and myself, it is a short project with results available towards the end of the year or early next year).
Summary of Proposal
The Internet is recognised as a vital component of our political information systems. Although widely used by governments and civil society groups, its effects on political processes, particularly deliberative ones, remain relatively unknown. Emerging research suggests that the Internet’s capacity to produce information easily has also led to data overload, undermining its deliberative potential. With the advent of the National Broadband Network, the data deluge promises to intensify, increasing the need for political information, in its various guises, to be delivered in more meaningful ways.[1] This is especially important for younger audiences who are increasingly abandoning broadcast media in favour of online political information[2].
This project is an iterative study and design of an online ‘Political Issues Analysis System’ (PIAS) to assist users in researching and analysing political issues. It will deliver information on key political topics (e.g., environmental issues, socio-economic issues, immigration, government policy) using authoritative data sources within a coherent ‘deliberative’ framework. It will evaluate users’ needs to comprehend political issues by applying several semantic indexing and data matching tools, and will design a prototype system. It will do this in part through five public workshops using the University of Melbourne’s Usability Lab, with each workshop focusing on a particular issue and utilising specific tools and methods.[3] It will, in tandem, uncover recommendations to assist in the design of a unique software tool that fosters user-driven processes to effectively filter and visualise online political information obtained from government datasets (partly within the Government 2.0 policy framework), the media, NGOs, historical data, and other user-generated online sources (blogs, videos, etc).
The outputs of the research will be a working prototype and a report documenting the research outcomes, along with a series of recommendations for further research. This project may lead to the first significant study of online deliberative processes in Australia, which could be competitive under the ARC’s Linkage or Discovery schemes. The work will benefit governments, community groups, and other major producers of political sites, as well as their users. The project is within the IBES Social Infrastructures and Community theme and, in particular, aligns with IBES and VeRS’ shared aspirations to make existing and available data more accessible. In summary, the broad aims of the project are:
- To explore the evolving applications of online political information tools in an Australian and International context (especially in the analysis of broadband-enabled video and audio)
- To examine deliberative processes with several stakeholder groups using semantic indexing methods and various communication tools at the University’s IDEA Lab.
- To build, test and provide further recommendations for a Political Issues Analysis System (PIAS)
Through these processes, we address the following research questions:
- How can we better understand online deliberation in the international and Australian contexts, and what tools are needed to support this?
- How can we better design deliberative ‘ideas’ using data and online analysis tools that involve people in a meaningful and inclusive way in consequential, goal-oriented political processes?
Approach and Outcomes:
The combination of theoretical groundwork, empirical study, and the design and implementation of the PIAS will make an essential contribution to the emerging body of research on the nature of political information on the Internet and, in particular, the use of government data within it. Of chief significance is that the research will make explicit and open up to critical analysis the dichotomy between the availability of government and other data sources and effective online deliberative design. By consciously foregrounding information abundance as a defining feature of the present information revolution through a unique fusion of political theory with semantic analysis and clustering tools, new perspectives will emerge, and fresh research areas in design will open up.
The approach is innovative and unique because it combines the theoretical sophistication of Politics and Media Studies with the technical proficiency of Humanities Computing, eDemocracy, and Information Systems to expose essential issues in online political information for critique in ways that were previously unavailable. [4] The work will open theoretical and technological pathways toward more genuinely identifiable (and sustainable) forms of online political engagement and democratic structuring.
Technology and potential collaborators:
Potential collaborators for this work include the UK’s MySociety (mysociety.org). They have developed some of the UK’s most well-known sites, including TheyWorkForYou.com and its local derivative, OpenAustralia.org. The open-source solutions, API, raw data, and results will be collaboratively developed and shared with Mysociety and OpenAustralia to complete the PIAS. Likewise, solutions developed through the ‘inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data’ and the Federal e-Government Strategy will be investigated and may identify potential collaborators. In essence, the PIAS is a ‘parsing’ project: to parse structured government and other datasets to extract and deliver meaningful political information to a general audience. It will explore ways to crawl, cluster, and analyse unstructured data contained in blogs and other ‘unofficial’ sources, including video and audio (perhaps using XProc processing).
The broad samples obtained through the PIAS iterative design workshops and subsequent prototype will provide a unique dataset to analyse web-based dialogue, agenda-setting, and responses to official government positions on important political topics. This work may be scaled up at a later date to include additional collaborators, particularly the Pollsters, who may be eager to invest in such a system.
[1]One of the first major agencies to coin the term the Data Deluge was the UK’s JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Briefing Paper, Data Deluge: Preparing for the Explosion in Data, 1 November 2004 http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/briefingpapers/2004/pub_datadeluge.aspx> (Accessed 14 May 2010).
[2] See: Clare Kurmond, Readership Decline Continues for Papers, Sydney Morning Herald, Sydney, 14 May 2010 http://www.smh.com.au/business/media-and-marketing/readership-decline-continues-for-papers-20100513-v1tk.html> (Accessed 14 May 2010).
[3]Interaction Design Evaluation Analysis (IDEA), Department of Information Systems, University of Melbourne, http://disweb.dis.unimelb.edu.au/research/interactiondesign//usability_lab.html> (Accessed 14 May 2010).
[4] Carson, L., Avoiding ghettos of like-minded people: Random selection and organisational collaboration’ in S. Schuman (ed) Creating a Culture of Collaboration, ed. Jossey Bass/Wiley.pp 418-423.
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