January 28, 2005

A linguistic contribution to American politics

According to an article by Daniel Terdiman in yesterday's NYT:

Joshua Tauberer isn't a stereotypical techie with a degree in computer science or engineering. Yet Mr. Tauberer, a 22-year-old doctoral student in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, is the brains behind GovTrack (www.govtrack.us), a site for up-to-the-minute information about Congress.

GovTrack differentiates itself from other sites devoted to Congress both by being free and by being fresh: it sends users e-mail updates anytime there's activity on legislation they want to monitor.

GovTrack lets users track activity of specific legislators. It can also send updates via RSS, or Real Simple Syndication. The site collects information from Thomas (thomas.loc.gov), the Library of Congress's legislation-tracking site, and the official sites of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The Time article gives links for GovTrack and Thomas, but not for Joshua -- to save you a trip to Google, here he is.

[Link by email from John Lawler]

Posted by Mark Liberman at January 28, 2005 11:05 AM