Analyzing a docket's public comments

• EPA-HQ-OAR-2021-0317 (the docket id; it is on the docket’s regulations.gov page)

What it never does: it never reads comment attachments (they are counted and flagged, since many substantive comments arrive as PDFs), never characterizes a submitter beyond the record, never builds coalitions from anything but the organization fields commenters themselves submitted, quoted verbatim, and never turns “arguments not made” into advice: those are angles absent from the sample, offered as starting points.

The newest comments are fetched under an honest cap, exact and near-identical form letters are grouped, and the model receives a condensed corpus where each unique text appears once with its submission count, its submitters as they identified themselves, and Regulations.gov’s own consolidated campaign counts kept distinct from what was fetched. When attachment-only comments are a substantial share of what was fetched, the analysis opens with the coverage statement before any claim about positions. The coverage picture and the most-submitted texts render as a structured block that survives a reload, and exporting to Word carries the full corpus with a link to every cited comment.