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!

This is a really clever infographic by Adam Bonica showing the ideological placement of occupations through an examination of their campaign contributions:

This covers only the 2008 election cycle and shows that, by and large, most occupations fall into the Democratic category aside from the obviously traditionally conservative oil and gas and auto dealer industries. What I would love to see here is what this graphic would look like over time. How would this look in the 2006 cycle or, better yet, the 2002 cycle? I'm pretty sure that you would find major fluctuations in the ideological placement of these industries depending on which party is in charge of Congress. Even more so, the size of the party's majority would matter too.

In what has been billed as data activism, several members of the data visualization community have united to help make sense of the recently released UK Met Office climate data from the last 200 years. After a call for the DataVis community to step up to the challenge of visualizing the data, a discussion forum was recently set up and quickly resulted in the data being extracted from its original format and made available as a MySQL database for easier manipulation. Only a few days later the visualizations are beginning to arrive. Today, Robert Kosara of EagerEyes.org posted his work, which utilizes the Protovis framework to generate an interesting interactive view of the historical temperature changes. In addition, there's some analysis from Robert and a promise of more to come. Additionally, Flink labs has also chimed in as well with their Processing based work. Jer Thorp, of the fascinating blog blprnt, has also started working with the data and has revealed his progress on flickr. It will be interesting to see the variety and breadth of visualizations as more projects are released in the coming weeks. (on the flip side, read about what John Graham calls Data Visualization Disease) On a slightly different front, the analysis and visualization project based on the UK's public spending, entitled "Where Does My Money Go?" has released a new prototype of their work. The project which won the UK government's Show Us a Better Way competition in 2008, has been working to create a framework for navigating the country's spending on a national and regional level. It's a fascinating exploration of financial data that is probably better experienced than explained. I recommend you head over and poke around.

In light of the recent release of the (US) Open Government Directive, these visualizations are just a few examples of what could be possible once more relevant US data is made publicly available.

Politico looks at health care lobbyists-turned-staffers on the Senate Finance Committee with the aid of LittleSis. For a look at staffers-turned-health care lobbyists you can see our research here.

Former Abramoff lobbyist Kevin Ring is on trial in, perhaps, the most interesting corruption trial in Washington in quite some time. Neil Volz, another Abramoff crony and former staffer to Rep. Bob Ney, testified the other day and included tons of gory details:

Volz described his lobbying team's practice of giving tickets, meals and drinks to public officials and staffers who were deemed valuable, as well as taking those individuals on trips.

"Really we just wanted to party," Volz said about a trip he took to New Orleans with Ney, former Ney chief of staff Will Heaton, and other lobbyists. He said the group met a client and toured some homes, but those were not the main objectives of the trip, which he described as "part of the corrupt relationship" he had with Ney and his staffers.

...

Volz described a discussion he had with Ring about "getting the joke," a term used for a lobbyist getting a staffer to prioritize an issue because the lobbyist is "taking care of them," after the Abramoff scandal began to surface in 2004.

"We thought, 'Boy, it would be pretty difficult to defend the idea of getting the joke,'" he said of his conversation with Ring.

Over the weekend, the New York Times posted this great visualization of Clean Water Act violations and the lack of enforcement in all 50 states. One of the primary reasons why government data needs to be online and in accessible formats is for news organizations, designers and coders to create visualizations or databases that can concisely explain an issue, or reveal a problem, to the public at large.

According to First Read, Senate Finance Chair Max Baucus will announce his plans for health care reform sometime this week. Baucus and his committee are seen as the crucial stepping stone for the reform plan pushed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. The outline of Baucus' plans will likely determine the shape and fate of health care reform this year. Due to Baucus' import in the reform discussion, we decided to take a look at the circle of lobbyists surrounding both Baucus and the other committee members. By tracking former staffers turned lobbyists for committee members, we can see what other interests are involved in crafting the coming health reform compromise. Senators are not simply island unto themselves, but important pieces in a network of companies, interest groups and lobbyists trying to formulate policy. Hopefully, these visualizations help to make that a little bit clearer. You can see all of them on one page here.

An analysis using Capitol Words comparing the words spoken by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Republican Minority Leader John Boehner in 2008 shows that the two issues receiving the most discussion by both parties in the 110th Congress were the debate over climate change legislation and off-shore drilling and the debate over the collapse of the financial sector and the ensuing recession.

Of the top fifty words spoken by both party leaders, there is overlap for only eighteen words. These eighteen words include five of the top thirty words spoken during the entire 110th Congress: Energy, Security, Country, Tax, and Oil. All of these words featured prominently in the debate over energy legislation during the summer months in 2008. Other words that overlapped include Economy, Budget, Jobs, Million and Billion, all words spoken during the September-October debate over the federal bailout of the financial services industry.

Also important are the many words that do not overlap. These show the Speaker's support for the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and the preview of congressional Republicans 2009 complaints about deficits and spending. The natural oppositional nature of being in the minority is also evident in the kinds of words used by Leader Boehner.

Speaker Pelosi used many words that imitated the language of Barack Obama: Future, Hope, and Leadership. These were staples of the Democratic presidential candidate's campaign. Leader Boehner was, at the same time, showing the combative nature of being in the minority, particularly during a difficult election year. Boehner's words included Democrat, Washington, and Ethics. These are clearly words used to attack the majority. Speaker Pelosi did not use the word Republican in her top fifty words.

The Republican Leader was also focused on traditional Republican policies of low spending with the words Spending, Prices, Cost and Growth. This definitely previewed the lines of argument coming from the minority in the current Congress.

One other interesting tidbit is the use of words that seem to stress similar ideas but from different angles. For example, Speaker Pelosi uses the word Opportunity while Leader Boehner uses the word Unemployment.

These infographics were created by Kerry Mitchell using data from the CapitolWords.org API and were visualized in Nodebox http://nodebox.net using the "graph" library.

Tell me what you see here in the comments.

Two nights ago, in his The Word segment, Steven Colbert actually used his show to do some investigative work into the money-in-politics connections that might have motivated to turn Rep. Luis Gutierrez' position on pay-day loans from oppose to support slight (read: non-existent) restrictions. Watch it:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Have Your Cake And Eat It, Too
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

Of course, I can't help but remind readers that the Center for Responsive Politics recently opened up their data--20 years worth--to be mashed, mixed, and visualized. Already we are seeing visualization pop up. Check out these from the University of Michigan.

Also, Sunlight's Chief Evangelist Greg Elin penned a guest column over at ProgrammableWeb about the release of this mountain of data. It's well worth the read.

To follow up on the previous post, the New York Times put together a useful chart to show the campaign giving by some of the major firms still standing. These firms are likely to play a large lobbying role in the fight over the new regulatory framework proposed by Geithner today. Here's a little snippet of the chart; follow the links for more: