A new interdisciplinary study by Shih‑Hung Chiu, Tianyu Han, Alison E. Post, Ishana Ratan, and Professor Kenichi Soga has been published in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. The paper, “Studying Tech Adoption with ‘Text‑as‑Data’: Opportunities, Pitfalls, and Complementarities in the Case of Transportation”, examines how digitized government records can inform our understanding of how agencies adopt new transportation technologies
Study Focus
The authors analyze meeting minutes and video transcripts from California transit agencies and compare these text-based sources to survey data focused on the adoption of technologies like transit signal priority systems.
Key Insights
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Greater data coverage: Digitized meeting records were available for more than twice as many agencies than for the benchmark survey.
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More representative: These records showed no bias toward larger agencies—a known issue in survey-based studies.
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Complementary value:
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Surveys provide structured, comparable data across agencies.
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Minutes reveal details on legal resolutions, funding, and decision context.
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Recordings offer rich qualitative insights into stakeholder engagement and rationale.
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Implications
Text‑as‑data methods can significantly expand and enrich research on technology adoption in public agencies, providing a scalable, unbiased, and nuanced complement to traditional approaches.