As part of the transition to Digication, Portfolio is going away! Portfolio will be fully decommissioned on July 1, 2024. As of July 1, 2023, there will be a new content freeze in Portfolio. You will not be able to add new pieces of content to your personal or organizational Portfolio. Existing content is still editable. Please continue to migrate your existing content from Portfolio to Digication. For more information about Digication, click here. For a discussion of options for transitioning your content on Portfolio, click here. To learn more about using Digication in your courses, click here.

  • MOODs: Identifying Outlier Passages and Texts in the Legislative Process

  • Contact:

    Dr. Peter Organisciak

    RMIS Faculty, University of Denver

      peter.organisciak@du.edu 

  • Timeline:

      Summer 2018 - Summer 2019

  • About MOODs:

    MOODs is an adjacent project similar to the IMLS grant-funded SaDDL project. While SaDDL looks at data from the HathiTrust, the MOODs project analyzes congressional bills. The goal of this project is to develop a way to help readers judge when and where pieces of legislature warrant closer reading. The system, called MOODs, aims to find textual Misfits, Omnibuses, and Odd Ducks.

    The project uses different methods to analyze legislature. First, the project uses topic modeling to create a context for what is "normal" in a bill. Based on that model, differences will be measured in two ways: measuring the fit between the model and the text and measuring how well one set of documents represents another. The project then considers how texts are distrbuted across those topic models and ends by developing a measure to indicate bills that are outliers.

    The MOODs project focuses on three research questions:

      What are the most novel federal bills currently?

      What are the most topically-diverse federal bills currently?

      What are the most thematic or thematically-unexpected passages in relation to a bill's overall content?

    The overall goal of MOODs is to allow better understanding of the political process in addition to helping people understand legislative texts in general.

The content displayed on this portfolio may not be accurate. Portfolio content is managed by individual users and is not property of the University of Denver.

This portfolio last updated: 15-Oct-2021 8:37 PM