Creating clear and accurate visualizations is dependent on the quality of the data assessed. The information produced and visualized here is from a messy data set containing duplicate rows for one data point. The data seen here is bulk Simple Senate Resolutions (SRES) from the 115th Congress and available through the Government Printing Office (GPO) website. (115th Congess.) The data set originally lacked schemas in over 200 documents before it was imported from XML into excel. Although much has been done to clean the data, work is still required. As a result the comparative visualizations available in this Tableau Public project misrepresent the number of SRES that are introduced and passed. Despite the inaccuracies produced here, the data set could potentially serve in a larger project. The GPO provides access to all congressional bills introduced in the US 113th, 114th, and 115th congresses. (CITE) This data could be collected and compared to other available data sets. Each bill introduced includes sponsors and co-sponsors, who are typically elected officials. The election data from a particular region, often available on state websites, could be compared and potentially mapped by congressional district. The image below uses the SRES Tableau project to compare bills introduced and bills passed in the Senate around three topics; families, health, and social welfare. (Image 1)
Image 1 Number of Simple Senate Resolutions Passed and Introduced in 2017
University of Washington’s Office of Planning and Budgeting hosts the BillTracker system, a resource intended to keep the UW departments and leaders informed. The tool is public access and allows users to search and browse pending legislation in the capitol. The tool is an excellent resource be does not analyze the subjects around the bill; topics, status, or persons. The tools does not utilize any visuals for depicting data. (Image 2) The resource that could be built with data comparing congressional Bill statuses, congressional districts, and voting results could utilize a GIS framework. This would be similar to a tool such as Social Explorer, although at a much smaller scale. (Image 3) The NYC Digital Tax Map is a smaller scale project hosted by the state. (Image 4) The data here presumably uses GIS mapping with city zoning maps to produce a visualization and state data to inform the system.
Image 2 University of Washington BillTracker homepage
Image 3 Social Explorer New York City sample
Image 4 NYC Digital Tax Map
115th Congress. (2017, October 07). 115th Congressional SRES Bill Status. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/bulkdata/BILLSTATUS/115/sres
GPO. https://github.com/usgpo/bill-status/blob/master/BILLSTATUS-XML_User_User-Guide.md
NYC. (2017). Digital Tax Map. http://gis.nyc.gov/taxmap/map.htm
Social Explorer. (2017). https://www.socialexplorer.com
University of Washington. (2017). BillTracker. http://opb.washington.edu/billtracker/
Tableau Public Project Link: https://public.tableau.com/views/SenateSimpleResolutionsIntroducedandPassedin2017/Dashboard1?:embed=y&:display_count=yes