Overview

The goal of this website is to answer the simple question: what do our representatives talk about? They may list off many topics, when they are campaigning, that they are going to work on, but are these same topics what they discuss on the congress floor?

Graphs

Congress Text allows you to answer that question through a variety of data visualization and data analysis techniques, with more coming soon. If you have ideas for additional graphs or metrics, please reach out to me, I'd love to hear your feedback.

Word Cloud

Shows the top 20 or so individual or word pairing a representative has said, but with the least important words removed (ex. the, am, but). The size of each word in the cloud is relative to the number of times the representative has said it.

TFIDF

TF-IDF stands for "term frequency-inverse document frequency." It is a common way to measure the importance of a word, in relation to an entire collection.

The "term frequency" part of the name refers to how often a word appears in a document. The more often a word appears, the more important it is considered to be. The "inverse document frequency" part of the name refers to how common or rare a word is across all the documents in the collection.

Search

One key feature of Congress Text, is that it allows you to search through the database for specific words spoken by representatives, here are some tips to improve your searches:

• The results are sorted by the most recent hearings, but what is returned is sometimes only a sample of everything in the database. If you want full access please reach out to me and we can set something up.
• You can select all reps, or filter to a specific state and search through all reps in that state.
• If you leave the search blank then all words will be searched.

Data sources

I'm looking to expand into more data sources, with Congressional Speeches and Twitter data being the next on the list. Please reach out to me if you know of other sources of congressional text data which would be good to tap into.

Congressional hearings

Source: US Publishing Office

Collection Method: Custom parser

Things to note:

• Not all hearing are transcribed, and not all transcriptions are parsed.

Contact

If you have any feedback, suggestions, or just want to say hi, please email me at: [email protected]

I am also happy to work with anyone to develop a solution that fits your specific needs, please let me know if you want to partner up on a project.

Updates

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