Congressional Republicans recently released a high production value video on the FISA fight, which prompted a quick response video in return. Political positions and identities are crafted in slicker and more appealing ways, witnessed also in recent discussions of presidentials’ skill at creating a coherent brand. While self-promotion is somewhat essential to electoral success, political messaging, much like commercial advertising, is sculpted around the expectations of the viewer. Savvier voters require savvier messaging (the intentionally lo-fi notwithstanding).

Lucky for us, the same forces that are making it easier to create propoganda are granting us a new view of our civic world. I’m starting to collect political data visualizations more consciously, with an eye to what might be missing.

A quick search already uncovered this gem: a visualization of the words in former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testimony. I love the added semantic context; the words can be rearranged and positioned within the sentences spoken, like a syntactic tag cloud.

Here’s a blog just about turning census data into KML files (which can be run within Google Maps). They have a great shot of all of the zip codes in Maine, arranged by color. (Census Data KML Visualization, aptly enough.)

Josh Tauberer’s GovTrack.us is full of ingeniously autogenerated mapping and visualizations, like his cartograms for each vote that make geography and representation equivalent, or the map of all congressional districts overlayed on a google map tile.

MySociety.org’s time travel maps allow users to define a point (near London), and then dynamically shade the map with travel time and property prices, which could be obviously valuable when home hunting. (If this is confusing, check it out… It’s easier to see than to explain.)

Good policy only comes from good information, which is only as helpful as it is comprehensible. That’s why I think we’re so drawn to new or novel data visualizations; we function as data visualizers all the time, and intuitively create schemas to help us navigate the world. Seeing facts and trends given new intuitive force through design and aesthetics is very pleasing.

Anyone have good congressional data visualizations?