An Interface and Search Engine for Deliberation

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Over the course of the past decade, a number of governmental and nongovernmental organizations at various levels (city, state, nation) have supported pilot programs intended to facilitate citizen deliberation and citizen-to-government communication with digital technologies, with mixed results. The PI argues that citizen-to-citizen deliberative democracy can be strongly supported with digital technologies if democratic principles are used from beginning toe end (i.e., to conceptualize, design, implement, deploy and evaluate new digital technologies for democracy). In this project the PI will build upon his previous work in text analysis and interface design methods for automatically summarizing and visualizing large volumes of e-mail, to develop an interface and search engine for deliberation that is designed to aid citizens to find, browse and sort through opposing opinions. A set of "hybrid" computational methods will incorporate both ideas and algorithms from social network analysis and corpus-based computational linguistics, in order to support large-scale e-mail based conversational data (like that found in high-volume newsgroups, listservs, weblogs, etc.) to be summarized as not just social interaction, nor simply linguistic production, but as sociolinguistic phenomenon. The PI envisions a tool for browsing and visualizing information, more than for information retrieval because, although users have a general information need - to discover opposing opinions - their need is not sufficiently precise to evaluate the technology according to the usual IR criteria of precision and recall. Consequently, the PI will utilize a new method of evaluation for this type of tool for democracy, according to its efficacy in reducing what in social cognition is called "false consensus" and "pluralistic ignorance." In other words, the PI will evaluate his tool according to whether or not it can provide an essential platform for deliberation, a means for citizens to discover and explore opposing and diverse opinions. Broader Impact: There is great hope that digital technologies can help reinvigorate the public sphere. Consequently, the outcomes of research projects such as this one should be of interest and of use to a wide range of citizens and citizen groups. The PI will establish a website for the project during and after completion of the software system, and will make his tool available for others to download and use. The users who will test the system in the evaluation phase will be drawn from a range of academic and non-academic communities, in order to ensure the software is accessible outside of the PI's immediate scientific community.