The public speaks: Using large-scale public comments data in public response research

Understanding public response to controversial projects, industries, and policies is of central focus to social scientists. During many of these contentious episodes, governmental agencies collect input from the public in the form of public comments. Public comments offer rich data for research on public response, and in recent years researchers have begun to tap their potential. In particular, large-scale, digitized public comments, when combined with advances in computational techniques raise exciting opportunities for research on public response. This paper reviews existing studies that have used large-scale public comments, identifies the key features that make public comments data uniquely useful in studies of public response, and discusses the common challenges at the data collection, data processing, and analysis stages, with particular attention to computational techniques for text analysis and for linking administrative records. The paper concludes by identifying promising directions for future research using large-scale public comments data.