Whoops. Looks like some lobbyists have been dropping their "bundles" where we can't see them.
Continue readingCampaign intelligence: The money behind today’s Illinois primaries; Koch brothers in the ad spotlight
Our look at the money, the strategy and the ads behind election 2014. On the radar screen this week: Illinois, the Koch brothers and more.
Continue readingSample the new, à la carte, Congressional Record parser
Introducing congressional-record! This is a project that can parse the flat text of the Congressional Record from the Government Printing Office's HTML files and produce bulk XML data for the entirety of the digital record — no database required.
Continue readingFollow the gun money with Sunlight tools
How we did this guns series, and how you can follow the money too using Sunlight's tools.
Continue readingHow Congress Commemorates President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
Word Cloud of Senator Cruz’s Obamacare Speech
Senator Ted Cruz's speech about Obamacare where he held the floor for 21 hours and 19 minutes is available for analysis using the Sunlight Foundation's Capitol Words project.
Continue readingUse Sunlight Tools to track civil rights issues
As the nation focuses on the 50th anniversary of the historic March for Jobs and Freedom that culminated with Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech, we decided to look at the subject of civil rights through the prism of some Sunlight tools:
It's a party affair. According to searches on our Capitol Words tool, which allows users to search text on the Congressional Record, Democrats talk more often about voting rights than Republicans do. Dems also own “Martin Luther King,” “redistricting,” “voter registration,” “civil rights” “Jim Crow,” “Selma,” and “March on Washington.” Republicans talk about ...
Continue readingSunlight APIs have a new home
As building blocks for our tools, our APIs are core not only to our work but also to the hundreds of outside applications and services that they power. (Hold up, what are APIs again?) In the past half year, we have taken your feedback and build a prominent API site that’s accessible from the main Sunlight Foundation navigation. The new API section features completely re-written and re-organized documentation, a summary of the status of each API and an interactive query builder to help developers build their requests. We’ve also added real time statistics for our APIs, so anyone can see their aggregate use over time.
Need inspiration? Want to help?
Aside from accessing our APIs, we have also collected real-life examples of our APIs at work-- just check out the gallery of projects using our APIs to see just some of the projects that can be built with our data. Then head over to the Community tab to see current data projects that we and other OpenGov-ers are working on. You can filter these projects by ones that need technical help, non-technical help and also projects to inspire.
Learn how to join the efforts on standardizing election data, to detailing key relationships between influencers and politicians, to scraping state level spending data and a whole host of other projects. Have a project you want to add? Submit it here.
What’s wrong with this picture? Greenhouse gas at all-time high
Carbon dioxide levels are going up. So are campaign contributions by fossil fuels interests.
Continue readingObama phones go by another name in Congress
Washington Post reporter Karen Tumulty's intriguing story today about the coining of a term and its political impact got us to wondering just how far the term "Obama phone" had embedded itself into the political culture. We've written before about how compounds of President Barack Obama's name have become politically charged.
We took a look via Capitol Words, Sunlight's tool that scans the Congressional Record and allows users to analyze speech patterns.
So far, no recorded mentions of "Obamaphone" or "Obama phone" on the floor of the House or Senate.
However, we did find a number ...
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