A few months ago we had a conversation on the ohp google group about word count analysis and political information.
In launching capitolwords.org, we’ve taken a big step toward creating simple presentations of complex political informaiton. Capitol words takes advantage of LOUISdb.org’s presentation of Congressional Record information, and counts words to find the most topical single word from the day’s debates and displays it for each day.
While simplifying the day’s debate to a single word is more like a mood ring than a polisci dissertation, capitolwords.org is an at-a-glance zeitgeist meter that didn’t exist before, and one that potently suggests great things that will likely soon exist. With tools like wordle.net allow quick creation of tag clouds from bodies of text, or twitter spectrum, which visualizes twitter bigrams by their frequency and proximity, easy ways to display the gist and focus of large and hitherto unapproachable texts become possible. The unwieldy becomes scrutable, if not downright compelling.
It turns out that the word of the day is a pretty good indicator of the day’s events, as evidenced by the recently repeated focus on “energy” or “iraq”.
The deepest insights created by this new simple tool may be due to its power as a proof-of-concept; the LA Times was inspired to suggest a number novel political tech development possibilities, and similar brainstorming has been catching around the Sunlight offices. Tools like news spectrum’s word arrays or the BBC’s comment visualizer gain new heft when their application is considered in the light of automated political text sources.Â
Even the idea of congressional version tracking gets new life when new computational ideas and visualization tools are considered; imagine having the IBM history flow tool applied to the provisions of the farm bill.
Capitol Words
June 19th, 2008 by John Wonderlich · 2 Comments
Tags: openhouseproject
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Gabriela Schneider // Jun 19, 2008 at 4:07 pm
If you like Capitol Words, check out its new widget, so you, too, can display the congressional word of the day on your site. Widget script is at the bottom of this page.
I thought Nancy Scola from TechPresident had a good a point in her write-up on the site about the need for a way to track “word burstsâ€? — and her mandate to use the API to make it happen:
“It’d be great to eventually track “word bursts,” to borrow a phrase from computer scientist Jon Kleinberg’s tracking of the popularity of phrases in State of the Union addresses, to give us insight into the changes in Congress’s zeitgeist over time. Again, there’s an API. So again, get to work.â€?
Elegant technology makes things simple | Reasonably Logical // Jun 23, 2008 at 3:15 pm
[...] encountered this site through the blog of the Open House Project. As I’ve said before, I enjoy reading their articles for the [...]
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