Congress Tweets

Our project, CongressTweets, looks at the relationship between your Congressmen’s political activity in Congress vs his/her activity on twitter. We are trying to find out if twitter activity is a good measure of political activity and good way for communicating with constituents. We were also interested in looking at voting trends relating to party, gender, and geography.

For this project we used the NYTimes Congress API as well as several Twitter related APIs.

Please find a zip of our code here

Opening Page

Missed Votes % vs Voted with Party % (Representatives)

Missed Votes % vs Voted with Party % (Senators)

Someone tweets a lot!

So does this guy!

Midterm Proposal: Andrea & Laura

Presentation

NewsWire Project

The idea behind the initial design was to create a fun, interactive visualization which would encourage people to look at the news/headlines without the current restrictions of “sections.” The headlines self-organize into their sections eventually, but initially they roam the screen freely, allowing people to see connections between stories that might not end up associated with each other in the paper or on the site.

Code, images, and application

Showing Complex Data

This reading had thoroughly explained several different types of visualization techniques, as well as providing examples and tips for implementation. While many of the examples were outdated, there were several examples that I never even thought of as a visualization technique, such as the cascading lists of the mac file-browser window, or the new-line form in data input mode. While the article says that there is no right or wrong in the alt-line color of a table, which changes it from more of a vertical layout to a horizontal layout, it seems to me that Tufte would consider the alt-coloring to be a waste of ink, lowering the data-ink measure.

Response: Reading 1

Data-Ink: Tufte

I really enjoyed seeing Tufte dismantle the typical bar graph. Everyone understands bar graphs, and we usually skim them quickly. They tend to be bulky and slow to read. I agree with earlier comments that say it is pretty intuitive to erase unnecessary parts of a visualization, but Tufte’s analysis of each and every line is much more thorough and precise than I was expecting. The idea of data-ink ratio is a very good one, but I think that he discredits a bit some valuable uses for ink in visualizations.

Database as System: Paul

This article brings up a good point about the challenges of interfacing the open-ended-ness of front-end interactions with logical, countable possibilities of code/database back end. The article also presents several interesting examples of unique types of data and databases that might be stored, stored, and used in interactive pieces. I think that a ridiculous amount of time must have been spent labeling the stills from all of Starsky and Hutch, and I am continually impressed with the sheer volume of work that is required to keep so much data organized.

Inspiration

Here are 2 projects that I really like:

• Zipcodes
• Visualizing Repetition in Songs