This prototype web app, the Congress Viewer , explores how the tools to measure lexical change – and more sophisticated NLP strategies such as parsing and measuring grammatical relationships – can open a window into political discourse that will make what happens in Congress more transparent to researchers and everyday citizens alike.
The Congress Viewer is a prototype app. For our final app, citizens using our toolset will be able to easily navigate from an overview showing change over time, to a dramatization of how different candidates talk about the same issue, to the in-text mentions of word use that a computer has used to produce the visualizations in question.
Below is a truncated version of the app. Click here to interact with a full sized version.
The Congress Viewer, a prototype text mining app, demonstrates how the tools used to measure lexical change, as well as sophisticated NLP strategies such as parsing and measuring grammatical relationships, can open a window into political discourse. On the one hand, it can make Congress more transparent. On the other, these tools can be used to gain new insights into the evolution and nature of political language as it occurs in different contexts, such as different time periods and discourse communities.
