Because of some the work we've done before on last minute negotiations and divided government, Sunlight prepared the following graphic that visualizes the recent history of US House votes on the debt ceiling, based on public voting records and a CRS report. The bars indicate the "yea" votes.

We'll have more commentary forthcoming, but here are a few initial thoughts on what this graphic makes clear:

1. Opposition to raising the debt ceiling is often partisan, with opposition coming from either party, based on who is in the White House. Many House Republicans have voted for raising the ceiling, just as President Obama voted against it when he was a Senator.
2. Divided government has necessitated support from both parties to raise the limit.
3. There is a significant untold story about the Gephardt Rule, a House Rule which enabled the limit to be raised with little public record. The role this rule played in setting up the current showdowns has been insufficiently examined.
4. Good access to congressional data and reports enables this kind of analysis; it could be improved.
5. Each of these votes was a predictable consequence of budgets that were passed before them, demonstrating another facet of political hypocrisy.

Daniel Schuman, Zander Furnas, Caitlin Weber and Matt Rumsey contributed to this post.

IBM Research recently released Many Bills, a new companion project to their wildly successful Many Eyes visualization tool set. Many Bills is billed as a visual bill explorer. More accurately, Many Bills is a web based, color coded visualization of 2009 U.S. congressional legislation. At its very heart the site tries to reveal what the different parts of a bill may be about by using computer learning to analyze and categorize the text of a particular piece of legislation. Because the analysis comes from a computer, they assign confidence scores to each section based on the likelihood that the categorization is correct.

While the default view can be a bit overwhelming at first, I've found that the "minified" view is a great way to review a series of legislative revisions/versions at a glance. More importantly, it also provides a quick and easy way to see where potentially unrelated legislation has been tacked on to a bill. For example, it is possible to see where the unrelated provision allowing visitors to U.S. National Parks to legally carry licensed, loaded firearms was inserted into the Credit Card Act of 2009. Just imagine if we could look at pending legislation in this "minified" color coded categorical view!

Sunlight recently spoke with the creators of Many Bills and offered a variety of feedback and suggestions for future features and options. We think there is a lot of potential for this project and we are really looking forward to the evolution of the Many Bills product. Congratulations to our friends at IBM!

(via)

Long ago, putting together a map of data points would be the sole domain of a skilled GIS practitioner employing an application like ArcView. These days, particularly with the advent of Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and OpenStreetMap, et al., there are a multitude of options for an individual to employ in displaying data geographically. Of course, there are, and will always be, technical options that require some level of programming chops. Fortunately, the pool of drop dead easy implementations that anyone can throw together with ease has grown a lot over the last few years. Then, there is the growing middle ground, lying somewhere between easy but rigid and difficult but flexible. Personally, I tend to hover in this netherworld, leveraging existing code, services or tutorials when possible but occasionally finding myself diving into the more technical areas when necessary and learning a lot in the process.

For those of you out there who might be interested in mapping data, I've put together a collection of links to a variety of services, code samples, resources and tutorials I've found useful in the past. These links range from new services that barely require anything more than a spreadsheet to complicated frameworks that require a great deal of technical knowledge. This is by no means all encompassing and if you happen to have additional links you'd like to share, feel free to leave them in the comments.

• Spatial Key "SpatialKey gives decision makers quick, easy, and cost-effective access to location intelligence so they can better achieve their objectives."
• Many Eyes Many Eyes displays data associated with geographic regions using either colors or bubbles.
• Maker "Anyone can build complex, data-rich maps."
• Tableau "With Tableau Public you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes."
• Mapspread "Import your data, geocode it, share it with coworkers and friends, create thematic maps, create interactive applications."
• Zeemaps Custom maps from lists.

<img src="http://assets.sunlightfoundation.com/images/blog/posts/mapping_coding.jpg" alt="Some Coding Required" class="aligncenter">
<ul id="nobullets">
<li><a href="http://cartographer.visualmotive.com/">Cartographer.js</a> (javascript)

A great javascript library that lets you create thematic maps by leveraging Google Maps.

<li><a href="http://code.google.com/p/gheat/">gheat</a>

"A map tile server for a heatmap layer" on top of Google Maps.

<img src="http://assets.sunlightfoundation.com/images/blog/posts/mapping_resources.jpg" alt="Resources" class="aligncenter">
<ul id="nobullets">
<li><a href="http://openlayers.org/">OpenLayers</a>

"OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source."

<li><a href="http://www.batchgeocode.com/">BatchGeoCode</a>

Batch geocode addresses in a spreadsheet with ease.

</ul>

<img src="http://assets.sunlightfoundation.com/images/blog/posts/mapping_tutorials.jpg" alt="Tutorials" class="aligncenter">
<ul id="nobullets">
<li><a href="http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-thematic-map-using-free-tools/">Flowing Data: Thematic Maps</a> (choropleth with Python, SVG)</li>
<li><a href="http://geography.uoregon.edu/GeogR/topics/maps.htm">Maps in R</a></li>
<li><a href="http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/7-days-of-source-day-1-goodmorning">GoodMorning</a> (processing based)</li>
<li><a href="http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/05/make-thematic-maps-with-cartographer-js/">Thematic Maps with Cartographer.js</a></li>
<li><a href="http://mapbox.com/documentation/adding-tiles-your-site/using-mapbox-tiles-google-maps-api/">Using MapBox tiles with Google Maps</a></li>
<li><a href="http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/oakland.html">Recreating Oakland Crimespotting with Protovis</a> (See: <a href="http://oakland.crimespotting.org/">Oakland.Crimespotting</a>)</li>
<li><a href="http://econym.org.uk/gmap/">Google Maps API Tutorial</a></li>
<li><a href="http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/spreadsheetsmapwizard/makecustommap.htm">Generate a Google Map from a spreadsheet</a></li>

This TED 2010 talk is also worth watching to see the future of online mapping.

CapitolWords.org is a Sunlight Foundation site that "visualizes the most frequently used words in the Congressional Record, giving you an at-a-glance view of which issues lawmakers address on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis." As 2009 began winding down, I started poking around at the data for the year to see if I could come up with an interesting way to visually summarize the year in Congress. With a total of 58 unique words commanding the top slots over the course of the year, I thought it might be interesting to color code and present them as a sort of "at a glance" Congressional calendar. As you can see below, the word Health pretty much dominated the latter half of the year, while the first half of 2009 was dedicated to a variety of topics including Land, Energy and Credit. It is also easy to see when Congress does a lot of its work on the floor and when they tend to take breaks throughout the year (April and August, apparently).

If we look a little deeper, for example using the word "Credit", we can see that there was a lot of use of the word in May '09, which happens to correlate nicely with the signing of the Credit CARD Act of 2009. Of course, not all of the top words are directly related to a particular bill, and that's part of the fun of Capitol Words. Hover over the various boxes/days and see if you can find any interesting correlations, or just marvel at the year that was 2009.

Some notes:

• I didn't set a threshold for inclusion, choosing to use the exact data that Capitol Words provides in the API, so you'll see that some days the top word was only spoken a handful of times. Such is the nature of the Congressional Record and CapitolWords.org.
• The "calendar" was generated using Processing and uses jquery QTip to show the metadata for the day.
• Aside from assigning "Health" a blue value, the other 57 words were randomly assigned colors from a palette generated using ColorSchemeDesigner.
• visually/conceptually inspired by colorjack.

A demo of an interesting student project from the University of Maryland, based on Recovery.gov data. (via)