Home |
Accounts |
Credentials |
Peers |
Projects |
Upload |
De-duplicate |
Cluster |
Tag Clouds |
View |
Browse |
Search |
Buckets |
Datasets |
Assign |
Notifications |
Toolbox |
Code |
Bookmarks |
Validate |
Report |
FAQ |
Service Levels |
Ideas for PCAT Improvements |
PCAT Wiki ToDo List |
ContactThe
Public Comment Analysis Toolkit (PCAT) is Web-based, university-hosted and supported software engineered for the specific task of reviewing public comments submitted via the
Federal Docket Management System or email to federal agencies. PCAT is version 2.0 of the
Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT), therefore it is also useful for sorting all kinds of
CAT-style datasets, including open ended survey responses, twitter feeds, Facebook News Feeds, and other types of public comment, such as comments left on blogs, news sites, or YouTube videos.
If you have lots of digitized text, you can use the PCAT platform to form a team of peers, create a project, upload data, discover important themes and issues, and organize your analysis. This system is the end product of ten years of NSF-funded public comment classification work by
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman, who has
published or jointly published numerous peer-reviewed papers on the subject.
- The system is fast, secure, interoperable, and scalable.
- This is a free or premium paid service based on award-winning research software.
- It extends carefully researched principles of search efficiency, scalability, accuracy, validity measurement, usability, and transparency.
- It leverages a novel approach to integrating peer networks, credentials and distributed work flow.
- It is equally useful to public and private actors and accessible to all.
- It allows you to show or share your raw data or work with anyone on the system, or to keep it private.
- It deals a blow to the tyranny of carpel tunnel causing mouse-clicks.
- It is very easy to learn and you can't break it. ;-)
Coding
Coding is a human-centered technique for sorting through text. Coders (or analysts) discover, tag and write about text passages that are automatically presented in the coding viewer. PCAT and CAT use two basic techniques, automated loading of text passages and keystrokes to record coding choices, to
significantly ease the physical burden, as well as the management tasks, associated with reviewing lots of text.
The “
code & retrieve” model allows teams to sort comments into categories for analysis while reducing the total number of carpel tunnel-causing mouse movements and clicks. Analysts can review the results on screen or export the coded text as part of writing a regulatory response. The PCAT system keeps track of everything, including which comments have been read or coded, and it allows you find, retrieve and utilize what you are looking for. The inclusion of a new “
search–>bucket–>dataset” work flow makes it possible to quickly divide the task of comment analysis across different themes. This streamlines the process of assigning unique or over-lapping sub-parts of the agency archive to different peers in the team.
During the coding process, you can introduce
bookmarks and write
associated memos about passages of text you want to return to. Often, these memos include snippets of highly relevant text that “triggered” the bookmark itself. Memos can be searched, reviewed, coded, and exported in .csv, .rtf, .xml and HTML formats. Coders can designate each memo as either private (between the owner of the dataset and the peer who is the author of the memo) or public (shared with every peer assigned to a dataset). In the “
Validations” module, the PCAT system simplifies the task of developing coherent and consistent coding practices. QDAP personnel use the adjudication process to better train coders and thereby improve coding and code definition validity.
Most Frequently Asked Questions
Why would I use this system? |
Where do I get FDMS bulk downloads? |
Does PCAT identify duplicates? |
What is QDAP?
© 2009 - 2010
Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP), in the
University Center for Social and Urban Research, at the
University of Pittsburgh, and
QDAP-UMass, in the
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. As of 2010, PCAT and this PCAT Help Wiki are maintained and improved by personnel from
Texifter, LLC, which is a software start-up located in North Amherst & Springfield, MA and online at
http://texifter.com/.
Content on this website was made possible with the following grants from the National Science Foundation:
III-0705566 "Collaborative Research III-COR: From a Pile of Documents to a Collection of Information: A Framework for Multi-Dimensional Text Analysis" and
IIS-0429293 "Collaborative Research: Language Processing Technology for Electronic Rulemaking." We are also grateful for financial support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. **Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.**
==
==
Home |
Accounts |
Credentials |
Peers |
Projects |
Upload |
De-duplicate |
Cluster |
Tag Clouds |
View |
Browse |
Search |
Buckets |
Datasets |
Assign |
Notifications |
Toolbox |
Code |
Bookmarks |
Validate |
Report |
FAQ |
Service Levels |
Ideas for PCAT Improvements |
PCAT Wiki ToDo List |
Contact