LinkedLegislation Blog

I’ve done a lot of thinking about the original sources of U.S. federal law. And I’m fortunate to work with the people who draft, amend, organize, and analyze the law. Much of the law is published in fragments distributed across paper volumes and across various federal websites. Publication of the... [Read More]

In my previous post, I discussed how to define similarity for bills in Congress. Given a new bill, which other bills are similar, and how are they related?We're building applications to let researchers look up any bill and get a list of similar bills. To do this, we separate the... [Read More]

Bills are often recycled. Most bills introduced in Congress are very similar to bills that have been introduced in a previous session. This reflects the imbalance between the number of bills that are proposed and bills that actually become law. Many bills are introduced for the purpose of "messaging" and... [Read More]

When I tell people that I help Congress become more transparent and efficient, they invariably say: "Good luck with that." I'm happy to report that we have, actually, had some good luck with that.I work with Xcential, a company that has deep expertise modernizing legislative systems, from building the drafting system... [Read More]

I was distracted yesterday. I saw a tweet by Alberto Cairo (@albertocairo) about a new web-based tool to convert data to sound. I have thought a lot about 'visualization' in sound since my days doing electrophysiology of locust brains at Caltech (I was even acknowledged for 'helpful comments' in a Nature paper).... [Read More]