This project is being offered through UC Berkeley's Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP). For the Spring 2021 semester, this project is seeking 2 students with experience in text analysis and data visualization. Eligible undergraduates may apply online January 12-25, 2021.
The Research Ready project seeks two students to help improve and maintain archives of government activity that researchers, journalists, and the public can easily query. The project team has already scraped the web for document files while retaining document metadata; identified and extracted meaningful data objects within the documents; linked those objects to external databases; prepared all this compiled textual data for computational analysis in R and Python; and partnered with the Social Science Research Council to host their newly formed database so that the public and other researchers can launch their own studies of the data. Now, we need people with text analysis and data visualization skills to help us improve this data and visualize it for the public and researchers. A successful semester would end with an improved database, and some nifty visualizations that make these tools more compelling for the public.
Research Ready Archives, formerly known as CapitolQuery (and Liberating Archives), is a project converting the static, difficult-to-research Congressional Record into a well-organized, easy-to-query database linking floor speeches and committee hearing minutes to data describing Members of Congress and their constituencies. This project is now operated in partnership with Goodly Labs, a non-profit organization founded by former BIDS Research Fellow Nick Adams. He and BIDS Director Saul Perlmutter co-lead this project.
