Civic Technology / Government Transparency

More about these things on my civic hacking page.

• "Case Study: GovTrack.us", in Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice (2010), O'Reilly Media. Buy The Book. Download My Chapter (PDF)
• "(Some) Transparency is a Paradox" invited talk at Open Government: Defining, Designing, and Sustaining Transparency workshop, Center for InfoTech Policy, Princeton University, January 21, 2010. text | slides | video (at 14:50)
• On the proposed Open Government Directive. May 22, 2009, public comment.
• Open Data is Civic Capital: Best Practices for "Open Government Data". May 19, 2009, unpublished monograph.
• "Crowd Sourcing Civic Engagement with Civic Hacking" invited talk at Studying Society in a Digital World, Center for InfoTech Policy, Princeton University, Apr. 25, 2009. text | slides
• "Open Government Data Standards and Expectations" session at Transparency Camp 2009, Feb. 28, 2009. slides
• "Civic Hacking" invited talk at Free Culture 2008 Conference, Politics & Transparency Panel, at Berkeley on Oct. 11, 2008. text | slides | video
• "Open government data policy and a semantic future for civics" invited talk for Civics in the Cloud panel at the Computing in the Cloud Conference, Center for InfoTech Policy, Princeton University, Jan. 15, 2008. text | slides | video
• Improve Databases, in The Hill, June 12, 2007.
• The Open House Project Recommendations Report: Congressional Information & the Internet, May 8, 2007.
• Legislators Should Live in a Glass House, in The American (online), Feb. 14, 2007.

You may also be interested in my blog posts on civic hacking and my archive of posts for the Open House/Senate Projects.

Linguistics

My academic publications...

• 2009. With Keelan Evanini. Intrinsic vowel duration and the post-vocalic voicing effect: Some evidence from dialects of North American English. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2009, September 6-10, 2009, Brighton, UK. PDF. Short-listed for best student paper.
• 2009. Goldilocks Meets the Subset Problem: Evaluating Error Driven Constraint Demotion (RIP/CD) for OT Language Acquisition. U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 15.1, 2009, Proceedings of the 32nd Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Slides | PDF
• Master's Thesis: 2008. Learning in the Face of Infidelity: Evaluating the Robust Interpretive Parsing/Constraint Demotion Model of Optimality Theory Language Acquisition. PDF
• 2008. Predicting Intrasentential Pauses: Is Syntactic Structure Useful? In Barbosa, P. A., Madureira, S., and Reis, C. (Eds.) Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2008 Conference, May 6-9, 2008. Campinas, Brazil: Editora RG/CNPq. Pp 405-408. PDF
• 2007. Champollion, L., J. Tauberer and M. Romero. 2007. The Penn Lambda Calculator: Pedagogical Software for Natural Language Semantics, in T. Holloway King and E. M. Bender (eds.), Proceedings of the Grammar Engineering across Frameworks (GEAF) 2007 Workshop. CSLI On-line Publications. PDF
• Undergraduate senior thesis: 2004. Crossing Bridges in Discourse Representation. PDF

and volumes of the U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics that I edited:

• Joshua Tauberer, Aviad Eilam, and Laurel MacKenzie (Eds.). 2008. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 14.1, Philadelphia, PA.
• Tatjana Scheffler, Joshua Tauberer, Aviad Eilam, and Laia Mayol (Eds.). 2007. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 13.1, Philadelphia, PA.
• Aviad Eilam, Tatjana Scheffler, and Joshua Tauberer. (Eds.). 2006. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 12.1, Philadelphia, PA.
• Sudha Arunachalam, Tatjana Scheffler, Sandhya Sundaresan, and Joshua Tauberer (Eds.). 2005. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Vol. 11.1, Philadelphia, PA.

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is an idealization of interconnected databases. Some of these publications are from my short-lived column on xml.com in 2006.

• Building a Civic Semantic Web, in Nodalities, August 2009.
• "Semantic Web II: Civic Hacking, the Semantic Web, and Visualization" talk at Transparency Camp 2009, March 1, 2009. slides | notes
• U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Corporate Ownership RDF Data, April 2008, unpublished monograph.
• "Open government data policy and a semantic future for civics" invited talk at Civics in the Cloud panel at the Computing in the Cloud Conference, Center for InfoTech Policy, Princeton University, Jan. 15, 2008. text | slides | video (repeated from above)
• Introduction to RDF. January 2008, unpublished monograph. (This is a more complete version of "What is RDF?" below.)
• The 2000 U.S. Census: 1 Billion RDF Triples, August 14, 2007, unpublished monograph.
• What is RDF?, on Xml.com, Jul. 26, 2006.
• Query Census Data with RDF, on Xml.com, Apr. 12, 2006.
• GovTrack.us, Public Data, and the Semantic Web, on Xml.com, Feb. 8, 2006.

Other Things

Apparently my Erdős number is 5 via Lucas Champollion.

Before all of this, I was a reporter/editor for The Daily Princetonian and did a lot of writing for that, and before that The Spectrum at POB JFK High School, now called The Hawkeye last I heard.