We launched Capitol Words just a couple weeks ago and got a really great reception from the blogs. I’m two weeks in to my new duties as Director of Sunlight Labs and while I didn’t have much (really, anything) to do with the project’s success, I am really excited about it. With the CapitolWords API we can start doing some interesting analysis of overall word-usage in Congress.

Some of this is obvious and you can see at the surface. Check out the screenshots below:

June seems to be predominantly about energy and oil. Septembers of even numbered years tend to be about security and intelligence. March tends to be about budgets and amounts.

Neat! Josh wrote most of the code and handled the architecture of the system. Garrett who heads our http://www.louisdb.org project also had a big hand in concieving and building the application. Of course Kerry, our wonderful Creative Director helped make the user interface and designed the site. It is written in Django and MySQL. Great work guys!