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Tag Archive: Capitol Words

How Congress Commemorates President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

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Gettysburg Address

Today marks the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Beginning with the famous phrase "Four score and seven years ago," the 1863 speech is an emblem of democracy and freedom and a popular recitation for social studies students and members of Congress alike. By searching Sunlight's Capitol Words site, we can see that since 1996 Republicans used the opening line on the House or Senate floor more than Democrats. And when searching the Congressional Record for "Gettysburg Address," the GOP also mentions the speech more overall.

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Use Sunlight Tools to track civil rights issues

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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 ...

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Sunlight APIs have a new home

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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.

Transparency_HappyHrLearn 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.

Want to meet other developers or get connected?

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Obama phones go by another name in Congress

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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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