What would it be like if we had true open access to large quantities of government text? We would be able to do much more than retrieve a page of the Congressional Record and read it. Researchers would be able to analyze the text and create new, innovative ways of discovering, browsing, searching, and reading text-based information.

Clifford Lynch has written eloquently about this in the realm of scholarly literature (Clifford A. Lynch, "Open Computation: Beyond Human-Reader-Centric Views of Scholarly Literatures [1]," Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, Neil Jacobs Ed., Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2006, pp. 185-193.).

I was reminded of these issues this morning when looking at Visualization Strategies: Text & Documents [2] on Tim Showers Web Design Blog (August 20th, 2008). Tim lists more than a dozen examples of techniques and tools. One of my favorites is the visualization [3] of the 2008 Democratic primary debates offered by the New York Times. You can hear the debate, search for keywords and see where they appear, browse a transcript, and more.

Shouldn't we have free, open, access to large bodies of all government texts (not just search-and-retrieve access to bits-and-pieces) so that we can easily create corpora that can be indexed, browsed, and analyzed?

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Tim Dennis [4]!