Due: Friday, May 22, 2009 - 5pm EST
Introduction
I'm a senior concentrating in Computer Science and have always been really interested in learning about politics and especially how influential the President can really be. To study this, I researched how many times presidents take action to get things done and created an interactive visualization to show the data I found.
Presidents make things happen in three main ways:
- Legislative - Negotiating with Congress to pass bills
- Executive - Executive orders, memoranda, proclamations, etc.
- Rhetorical - Speeches and appearances
I show: the number of requests and repeat requests made to Congress.
I show: the number of proclamations signed.
I show: the number of public activities.
Questions
I answer the following questions with my visualization:
Broad
- How powerful is the modern president?
- How much of this power is attributed to issuing proclamations?
Specific
- How has the number (of different topics) of proclamations changed over time?
- How does the number of proclamations relate to the year of the President’s term?
- How does the number of proclamations differ among Presidents?
- How does the number of proclamations differ among Presidential parties?
Data Sources
- Legislative
- Executive & Rhetorical
- Presidential Info & Photos
The professor supervising my Independent Study agreed to allow me to make visualizations using data he’s collected over the years on presidential proclamations and their areas and dates. He asked me, however, not to share the data on proclamations, so I made up some proclamation data for a few presidents. You can econtact him about the data at cdiaz at fas.harvard.edu.
I typed in this data from a book on Presidential statistics that my professor lent me called Vital Statistics on the Presidency: The Definitive Source for Data and Analysis on the American Presidency, 3rd Edition.
I wrote a scraper in ruby to get this data from Wikipedia
Target Audience
(1) The Public and (2) Political Scientists
Completed Visualization and Interaction Methods
Features, ordered by importance, for each area (legislative, executive, rhetorical):- Automatically load data
- Press LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to cycle through the three general types of data: legislative, executive, rhetorical. (The specific data type shows up on the US flag.)
- Click on "US Presidential Power" to plot a line graph of number vs. year for all presidents.
- Show number value on rollover.
- Click on a president's name or press the UP and DOWN arrow keys to cycle through the presidents to:
- Plot a stacked bar graph of number vs. year for each president.
- Show area and number value on rollover.
- Show President name, info, and photo.