Unfluence. This project was built to test the idea of visualizing candidates and their contributors as a browseable network. A sort of quick visual data mining tool for transparency that everyday people can use. Putting the data in a network form also makes it possible to compare patterns of giving across various states and interest groups. A query is generated from your search settings and sent to National Institute on Money in State Politics' API which looks in their databases and returns a list of matching candidates as an xml file. For each candidate they get a list of the top contributors, and discard any with contributions below the value threshold you set. This donor-recipient information is formatted into a network and passed to a program called GraphViz that computes positions for the nodes and draws it (with help from ImageMagik). The image is passed back to you. When you click on a node, they send queries to NIMSP and Project VoteSmart to check if there is information available (this requires some hacked scraping and matching code) for that candidate, and include the links in the info bubble. The visual effects are provided by script.aculo.us. 
No comments:
Post a Comment