research-article

Many bills: engaging citizens through visualizations of congressional legislation

Authors:

Yannick Assogba,

Matt McKeonAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 433 - 442

https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979004

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

US federal legislation is a common subject of discussion and advocacy on the web, inspired by the open government movement. While the contents of these bills are freely available for download, understanding them is a significant challenge to experts and average citizens alike due to their length, complex language, and obscure topics. To make these important documents more accessible to the general public, we present Many Bills (http://manybills.us): a web-based set of visualization tools that reveals the underlying semantics of a bill. Using machine learning techniques, we classify each bill's sections based on existing document-level categories. We then visualize the resulting topic substructure of these bills. These visualizations provide an overview-and-detail view of bills, enabling users to read individual sections of a bill and compare topic patterns across multiple bills. Through an overview of the site's user activity and interviews with active users, this paper highlights how Many Bills makes the tasks of reading bills, identifying outlier sections in bills, and understanding congressperson's legislative activity more manageable.

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Cited By

Méndez GMoreno OMendoza P(2022)LegisLatio: A visualization Tool for Legislative Roll-call Vote DataProceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction10.1145/3554944.3554957(1-8)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3554944.3554957
Baumer ESnyder JGay G(2018)Interpretive Impacts of Text VisualizationACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/321435325:4(1-26)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3214353
Ruppert TBannach ABernard JLücke-Tieke HUlmer AKohlhammer JZhang KKerren A(2016)Supporting Collaborative Political Decision MakingProceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction10.1145/2968220.2968223(104-111)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2968220.2968223
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Index Terms

Many bills: engaging citizens through visualizations of congressional legislation

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 2011

3530 pages

ISBN:9781450302289

DOI:10.1145/1978942

General Chair:
Desney Tan
Microsoft Research
,
Program Chairs:
Geraldine Fitzpatrick
Vienna University of Technology
,
Carl Gutwin
University of Saskatchewan
,
Bo Begole
PARC
,
Wendy A. Kellogg
IBM Research

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 May 2011

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CHI '11: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

May 7 - 12, 2011

BC, Vancouver, Canada

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CHI '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 410 of 1,532 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

Méndez GMoreno OMendoza P(2022)LegisLatio: A visualization Tool for Legislative Roll-call Vote DataProceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction10.1145/3554944.3554957(1-8)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3554944.3554957
Baumer ESnyder JGay G(2018)Interpretive Impacts of Text VisualizationACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/321435325:4(1-26)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3214353
Ruppert TBannach ABernard JLücke-Tieke HUlmer AKohlhammer JZhang KKerren A(2016)Supporting Collaborative Political Decision MakingProceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction10.1145/2968220.2968223(104-111)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2968220.2968223
Kim NJung JKo EHan SLee CKim JKim JGergle DMorris MBjørn PKonstan J(2016)BudgetMapProceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2818048.2820004(1028-1039)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2818048.2820004
Lin FHao DLiao D(2016)Automatic Content Analysis of Media Framing by Text Mining TechniquesProceedings of the 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)10.1109/HICSS.2016.348(2770-2779)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/HICSS.2016.348
Kim NLee CJung JKo EKim JKim JBegole BKim JInkpen KWoo W(2015)BudgetMapProceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2702613.2732932(1097-1102)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2702613.2732932
Dandan Huang Tory MAseniero BBartram LBateman SCarpendale STang AWoodbury R(2015)Personal Visualization and Personal Visual AnalyticsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2014.235988721:3(420-433)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TVCG.2014.2359887
Baumer ECipriani CDavis MHe GKang JJeffrey-Wilensky JLee JZupnick JGay G(2014)Broadening Exposure, Questioning Opinions, and Reading Patterns with Reflext: a Computational Support for Frame ReflectionJournal of Information Technology & Politics10.1080/19331681.2013.87207211:1(45-63)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2014
https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2013.872072
Curtotti MMcCreath E(undefined)Enhancing the Visualization of LawSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.2160614
https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2160614

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