BCC-SBE: PI-NET: Poli-Informatics Research Coordination Network

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This Research Collaborative Network (RCN) advances the new interdisciplinary field of PoliInformatics. PoliInformatics brings informatics to political research by promoting the analysis of very large and unstructured government datasets. The central objective of the RCN is to encourage scholars representing diverse disciplines such as computer science, information science, electrical engineering, statistics and computational linguistics to collaborate and apply their skills to the analysis of U.S. government activity. Over a three year period, the RCN will establish a new interdisciplinary scholarly network; conduct research competitions and workshops; train the next generation of PoliInformatics researchers; and produce a compendium of papers demonstrating the importance of this new field. Large government data sets inspire previously unimagined research questions, analytic methods, and technology tools. The RCN will lead to valuable innovations in how government activities such as lawmaking, budgeting and policy implementation are studied and understood. It will encourage highly capable scholars possessing diverse research perspectives to focus their attention on important technical and substantive challenges presented by rapidly expanding repositories of government data. The infrastructure that these researchers develop to address these challenges will then be available for use by others--students, journalists, interest groups, and citizens. Thus a critically important broader impact of the RCN will be to foster improved public understanding of the roles and activities of the U.S. government.