A Fascinating Look Inside Those 1.1 Million Open-Internet Comments by Elise Hu.
From the post:
When the Federal Communications Commission asked for public comments about the issue of keeping the Internet free and open, the response was huge. So huge, in fact, that the FCC’s platform for receiving comments twice got knocked offline because of high traffic, and the deadline was extended because of technical problems.
So what’s in those nearly 1.1 million public comments? A lot of mentions of the F word, according to a TechCrunch analysis. But now, we have a fuller picture. The San Francisco data analysis firm Quid looked beyond keywords to find the sentiment and arguments in those public comments.
Quid, as commissioned by the media and innovation funder Knight Foundation, parsed hundreds of thousands of comments, tweets and news coverage on the issue since January. The firm looked at where the comments came from and what common arguments emerged from them.
Yes, NPR twice in the same day. 😉
When NPR has or hires talent to understand the issues, it is capable of high quality reporting.
In this particular case, clustering enables the discovery of two themes that were not part of any public PR campaign, which I would take to be genuine consumer responses.
While “lite” from a technical standpoint, the post does a good job of illustrating the value of this type of analysis.
PS: While omitted from the NPR story, Quid.