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The Sara Fine Institute

People Director's Activities

Current Projects

dgo2008
http://www.dgo2008.org/
SFI Director Stuart Shulman serves as conference co-chair for this international conference on digital government research.

MeTTEG07
http://conferences.cs.unicam.it/metteg07/
SFI Director Stuart Shulman gave a keynote speech at the 1st International Conference on Methodologies, Technologies, and Tools enabling e-Government.  This conference took place in September 2007 in Camerino, Italy.

Kazakhstan trip, 2007
http://shulman.ucsur.pitt.edu/kazakh07.htm
SFI Director Stuart Shulman recently traveled to Kazakhstan.  To learn more about his travels, visit this site. 

eRulemaking Research Group
http://erulemaking.ucsur.pitt.edu/

The eRulemaking Research Group was formed at the January 2003 National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop titled “E-Rulemaking: New Directions for Technology and Regulation,” held at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University.  Following the workshop, computer scientists Eduard Hovy (University of Southern California-Information Sciences Institute) and Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon University) teamed up with social scientists Stuart Shulman (University of Pittsburgh) and Stephen Zavestoski (University of San Francisco). With funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the group has since participated in and organized workshops, made presentations to federal agencies, NGOs, and private sector representatives, launched an eRulemaking text data testbed, and collaborated with five federal agencies (DOT, EPA, USDA, BLM, and USFS) in the submission of a successful 4-year proposal, funded by the NSF’s Digital Government program. Computer scientists in the eRulemaking Research Group focus on text clustering, text searching, near-duplicate detection, opinion identification, stakeholder characterization, and extractive summarization. Social scientists in the group are studying the impact of such tools and the Internet more generally on the process of rulemaking. Over the last five years, our group has collected 16 public comment datasets comprising in excess of 1,000,000 public comments on federal regulatory actions.

The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP)
http://www.jitp.net

The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) seeks high-quality manuscripts on the challenges and opportunities presented by information technology in politics and government.  The primary objectives of the journal are to:

  • promote a better understanding of how evolving information technologies interact with political and governmental processes and outcomes at many levels,
     
  • encourage the development of governmental and political processes that employ IT in novel and interesting ways, and
     
  • foster the development of new information technology tools and theories that can capture, analyze, and report on these developments.

Manuscripts should have significant theoretical and empirical roots, preferably in both political science and IT, but should at least contain significant content in both areas.  We are particularly interested in manuscripts in three areas: how information technology (IT) influences politics and government; how politics and government influence the development and use of IT; and how IT can be, or is being, used to advance research and teaching about politics and government, particularly in political science.

JITP welcomes and strongly encourages submissions based on interdisciplinary approaches including (but not limited to) information and computer sciences, law, geography, communications, economics, and sociology. We anticipate publishing articles on e-government, as well as applications of information technology in campaigns, elections, and public sector management. Other articles will examine the political economy of IT and governance of the Internet. We also anticipate publishing articles on forms of citizen interaction with government, from web logs ("blogs") at the "net-roots" to hyperlinked transnational social movements.  Finally, we are interested how technology developments are advancing political science research and instruction.

The Qualitative Data Analysis Program
http://www.qdap.pitt.edu

From biomedical, public health, and educational research, to the behavioral, computational, and social sciences, effective qualitative data analysis plays a critical role. Accurate and reliable coding using computers is central to the content analysis process. For new and experienced researchers, learning advanced project management skills or even software basics adds hours of struggle in trial-and-error sessions.
 
Experienced coders and project managers can deliver the data you need in a timely and expert manner, without the struggle. For this reason, we have created the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) as the newest program initiative at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR). Drawing on a unique blend of expertise in qualitative data analysis, ongoing collaboration with computer scientists, and several years of funded research, QDAP offers a rigorous approach to analyzing text and managing projects.

Go to College Wiki
http://gotocollege.wikispaces.com/

This wiki is a University of Pittsburgh class project created on November 8, 2006. The class is Digital Citizenship, and it focuses on the relative advantages and disadvantages of inequitable access to computers and the Internet. The course is taught by Dr. Stuart W. Shulman the Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program and the Sara Fine Institute, as well as the eRulemaking Research Group.

Recent Projects

Coding across the Disciplines: A Project Based Workshop on Manual Annotation Techniques
http://codeshop.wikispaces.com/

Coded text corpora are used for basic and applied research in social and computational sciences. Yet the manual annotation of text—the coding—is often conducted in an ad hoc, inconsistent, non-replicable, and unreliable manner. While many researchers from a variety of disciplines stand to benefit from reliably recorded, publicly available, transparent, large-scale observations produced by independent coders, very few current researchers can say with confidence that they know where to acquire, or even how to produce, such annotated text corpora. A primary short-term objective of this workshop was to build on the efforts of a small number of existing projects that feature the manual annotation of text. A related goal was to foster a particular approach to manual coding that is designed to be useful for building algorithms for basic and applied research on social and political issues.

Digital Citizenship
http://digcit.ucsur.pitt.edu/

This project was initiated during the 2001-2002 academic year based on consistent concerns raised in response to early eRulemaking presentations. Various audiences asked: will electronic rulemaking, and eGovernment in general, exacerbate the negative impact of the digital divide? We felt the answer was yes and set about looking for a role academic institutions might play increasing technological literacy beyond the campus gates. The result was a study of the efficacy of service-learning as a technique for enhancing digital citizenship.

 

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