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The Sunlight Foundation's mashup site Capitol Words relaunched this week and now offers a very handy way to see what keywords are being used in the US Congress in general and by particular congress members. If you pay only passing attention to politics, Capitol Words is a great way to familiarize yourself with politicians in a hurry. It's a mashup of several different ways to search the Congressional Record and it's fun to use.
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There's also a lot of interesting little tidbits that can be discovered using the site. Did you know that Republicans talk about Google far more often in Congress than Democrats do? That Oregon Republican Gordon Smith uses the word "hate" more than almost any other word?
As you can see from the images below, there are some shortcomings to the system. It only parses single words (hate is presumably connected to crime, for example) and you can't click on those words to see the context they were used in. For a much more full-featured service regarding congress, see our coverage of the Sunlight Foundation's fantastic site OpenCongress. See also Sunlight's lab project, Capitol Tweets (embedded, right), which consultant to the Foundation Nancy Watzman wrote about here. Check out the new CapitalWords.org.
Cute old guy photo CC via Flickr user aflcio2008.
Discuss-- Vickie L. Kline vkline@ycp.edu Systems Librarian Phone: 717-815-1459 Associate Professor FAX: 717-849-1608 York College of PA - Schmidt Library York, PA 17405-7199 "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" -Albert Einstein
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