Anthony Mattox, a very talented student at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), recently released some processing code called WikiWeb to visualize the connections between pages at Wikipedia.

I read about the project and thought, “I wonder if that would work with OpenCongress’s wiki?” I grabbed the open sourced creative commons code, changed a few URLs to point to OpenCongress’s Wiki and voilà.

It is running in the browser as a Java applet, so you will need to “trust” it before it will “work.” Don’t worry, it doesn’t do anything nefarious. It just needs your trust before it can go to OpenCongress and fetch pages from the wiki.

Once it loads, you’ll want to click the dot in the middle “Main Page” and select the first option on the left of the menu which will “load links” and then you’re off. Any dot (which represents a page of the wiki) can be expanded to show the other pages it links to.

Just something fun to demonstrate the value of open source, Creative Commons and of course Processing. Thanks to Anthony for making the code available!