SGER: Computer-Assisted Interpretation of Citizen Input in Rebuilding Lower Manhattan

Overview

Computer-mediated communication, specifically facilitated by the Internet, offers new channels for citizens to express their views to elected officials, government agencies, and civic associations. Individuals have embraced email, mailing lists, and web-based forms as a method of registering their opinions, frequently resulting in tens of thousands of comments addressed to a given entity. The resulting deluge poses a technical and political challenge: how can official recipients, who have invited citizen input, make sense of commentary received on such a massive scale? How can meaningful patterns be efficiently and effectively identified? This paper proposes the use of computer-assisted interpretation and dynamic visualization complemented by human analysis as one means of addressing these challenges.