CarrinaCongress: Information Visualization Techniques to Compare Online Identities of the Members of

Congress Athir MahmudPhD Candidate

Technical Communication

Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities and Computer ScienceUniversity of Chicago

November 2015

About Me

• Background: CS, HCI, Psychology, & Art• Research: Information visualization of identity

presentation

CarrinaCongress: Information Visualization Interface

• Designed to allow users to compare members of Congress

• Accessible, visual, easy-to-compare• Infographic-like look and feel• Colors based on political party (mostly)• “Carrina” means “comparison” in Arabic

The Problem

• People want better information about members and candidates

• Twitter includes a lot of “noise” • Currently, there is no single, consolidated

source of information about Congress• No method to visually compare members at

the same time

Multiple Tools To Get Info About Congress

• Government tools: senate.gov, house.gov, congress.gov

• CrowdSource tools: Govtrack.us for roll calls• Twitter tools:

https://twitter.com/CASMLab/lists/u-s-house-of-reps-113th

• Non-profit transparency: OpenCongress.org• Future home of these:

www.followyourleaders.org

CarrinaCongress Design Goals

• Simplify data that is difficult to understand• Provide multiple forms of data to offer a “big

picture”• Leverage existing and social media data to

create dashboards of information• Easy to compare any two candidates• Ensure access to this information nearly

instantaneous

Hemphill, Otterbacher, & Shapiro (2013)

Profiles & Tweet Behavior

Word (Tag Clouds)

CarrinaCongress – Tweet Frequency

Source: Congress.gov

CarrinaCongress: Timeline of Tenure in Congress

Source: GovTrack.us

CarrinaCongress: Absences For Votes

Compare Two Members, Same Party?

Same Party Comparison (Republican)

CarrinaCongress End Goals

• Visually compare members of U.S. Congress• Give users insight into how Congress behaves

on Twitter• Offer users opportunity to learn about

members’ identity presentation• Allow them to view multiple types of

information not found on Twitter

Contact and Connect

CarrinaCongress application coming soon:– www.followyourleaders.org – www.carrinacongress.com (coming soon)

Email: athir@hawk.iit.eduTweet: @AthirMahmud Blog: www.athir.com