Getting data on your government
From the post:
I created an R package a while back to interact with some APIs that serve up data on what our elected represenatives are up to, including the New York Times Congress API, and the Sunlight Labs API.
What kinds of things can you do with govdat? Here are a few examples.
How do the two major parties differ in the use of certain words (searches the congressional record using the Sunlight Labs Capitol Words API)?
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Let’s get some data on donations to individual elected representatives.
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Or we may want to get a bio of a congressperson. Here we get Todd Akin of MO. And some twitter searching too? Indeed.
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I waver between thinking mining government data is a good thing and being reminded the government did voluntarily release it. In the latter case, it may be nothing more than a distraction.