Dr. Stuart W. Shulman is a Research Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is founder and former Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Pittsburgh and he currently directs QDAP-UMass. The QDAP labs are fee-for-service coding labs that work on projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), the Smithsonian, and other U.S. funding agencies.
Dr. Shulman is the founder and CEO of Textifter, LLC. He was the sole inventor of the Coding Analysis Toolkit (CAT), an open source text analysis software project that led to the commercial development of the DiscoverText software application. He is also the inventor of Sifter, a tool to get free estimates of the cost to license data from the complete history of Twitter. Dr. Shulman has been the Principal Investigator and Project Director on 10 National Science Foundation-funded research projects focusing on electronic rulemaking, human language technologies, manual annotation, digital citizenship, and service-learning efforts in the United States.
As Director of the NSF-funded eRulemaking Research Group, Dr. Shulman has organized and chaired federal agency-level electronic rulemaking workshops at the Council for Excellence in Government (2001), the National Defense University (2002), the National Science Foundation (2003 & 2006), and The George Washington University (2004). In 2006, he chaired a NSF-funded workshop at the University of Pittsburgh titled “Coding across the Disciplines,” which brought social and computer scientists together to discuss annotation and computational science.
For five years, Dr. Shulman served on the Program Committee for the NSF’s National Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o). He was the dg.o 2006 Workshop and Tutorial Chair and Chair of the inaugural Digital Government Society Election Committee. In 2008, he served as the dg.o conference Co-Chair and, in 2009 and 2010, co-chaired workshops on “YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States” and “The Politics of Open Source.” Dr. Shulman reviews individual NSF proposals from multiple cross-cutting NSF divisions and has served on a NSF proposal review panel.
Dr. Shulman served for six years as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP). He was the 2004-2005 President of the American Political Science Association’s organized section on Information Technology & Politics and for three years was Editor of the section newsletter, The ITP News. He now serves as Editor Emeritus for JITP.
“Stu” is a former Oregon Tilth certified organic farmer and garlic enthusiast who teaches courses on American national government, environmental policy, sprawl, information technology, qualitative research methods, digital citizenship, governance, and service-learning. In the fall of 2009, he launched a software start-up, Texifter, LLC, which aims to help individuals, organizations, and “crowds” when they are searching, sifting, sorting, and analyzing large numbers of documents.
He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Boston University (Political Science and English) and a Ph.D. from the University of Oregon (Political Science).
