Thomas Gibes
.Visualization
.Experience
.Interface
Designer
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- RT @ChartPornOrg: Ideological Leanings of Supreme Court Justices http://t.co/C39Q1WamFh
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Posts
- Jul 20, 11
In my last post I examined the leaders of the Senate. Today I’ll start discussing the leaders of the house, beginning with the mysterious, bipartisan dot that is John Boehner, the Speaker of the House.
In the above image, Boehner is shown compared against all the members of the House. I’ve used a new feature I added last week, “dots mode,” to more clearly present where he is placed along the two axes. How could Boehner, the leader of a Republican, conservative House, end up in the most bipartisan position of any Republican?
The most important point to remember is that Clear Congress Project derives its attributes solely from their legislative sponsorship and co-sponsorship record. So while Boehner may have a more partisan voting record, this is not taken into account. A quick look at Boehner’s OpenCongress page reveals that Boehner has only sponsored three pieces of legislation (two of which garnered no cosponsors) and has co-sponsored only one piece of legislation. This lack of legislative activity is likely due to his schedule as Speaker. His organizational duties, negotiations, and golf outings fill up a lot of his schedule and leave little room for writing and co-sponsoring legislation. Even members slightly to the right of him have co-sponsored a much higher amount of legislation. For Example, Peter King has cosponsored over 100 pieces of legislation this session.
However, this doesn’t explain everything. What Boehner’s position also reveals is just how partisan the Republican majority actually is. As Republican members of the House put forth legislation that draws significantly more Republican support than Democratic support, they all drift further and further to the right on the partisanship axis. This is understandable, given that they have a significant majority. However, I would also argue that this reveals how ideology has gripped the Republican party, forcing them to put forth a flood partisan legislation that has little chance of passing the Democratically-controlled Senate. If Republicans were interested in passing legislation that could become law, they would have a much more bipartisan record as a whole, but it appears their main legislative goals are strictly political in nature.
Boehner’s legislative bipartisanship is mostly a result of his lack of legislative activity but is also a reflection of the partisan nature of his party, which is currently more interested in satisfying its political desires rather than passing legislation which has a realistic chance of becoming policy.
- Jul 13, 11
Today I start examining the party leaders through the lens of Clear Congress Project and what their legislative record can tell us about how Congress functions and that the leaders by name are not necessarily the legislative leader.
First, we’ll start off in the Senate where Harry Reid has served as the Democratic majority leader since 2005. As you can see from the image above, Reid is the undisputed legislative leader. At one point or another, every Senator has co-sponsored a piece of legislation brought forward by Reid. This demonstrates that even within a divided Congress, the majority leader of the Senate serves as the main driver of legislation. The Senate majority leader is likely to sponsor “must-pass” legislation and, as such, will collect a large number of co-sponsors who don’t want to be left out. Another factor is that Reid, as a deal-maker, will likely also attract co-sponsors as part of the deal-making process. It’s also interesting to note that the high number of cross-party co-sponsors gives Reid a stronger record of bipartisanship than many of his colleagues.
Now, if we turn our attention to the Republican minority leader, Mitch McConnell, we get a much different picture. Looking at the above image, you can see that McConnell is not the legislative leader within his own party, with Senators Orrin Hatch, Kay Hutchinson, Jim DeMint, and John McCain garnering more co-sponsors. All of them, despite attracting more cosponsors, are also further to the right than McConnell on the partisanship axis. In other words, the minority leader has demonstrated less legislative leadership than other, more partisan members within his own party. This may be function of McConnell’s organizational duties as the minority leader, but is also likely a result of the pressure he feels from the more conservative members within his own party, who are quietly fighting for his leadership position (such as Jim DeMint) or loudly fighting for their legislative lives (Orrin Hatch).
Tomorrow I will examine the leaders within the House and the mysterious, tiny, bipartisan dot that is John Beohner.
- Jul 12, 11
Clear Congress Project was posted on infosthetics.com today. A big thanks to Andrew Vande Moere for the posting and wonderful write up about the project.
Tomorrow I’ll be back to analysis, examining the leaders of each party and what Clear Congress Project tells us about them and how Congress functions.
- Jul 08, 11
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I was going to examine how Republican leadership in the house is something of a reflection of the pattern seen on the Democratic side, where the Progressive Caucus counts among it’s members every major Democratic legislative leader. I was too hasty in making this assumption, however. On the Republican side, the Tea Party Caucus in fact does not count the Republican legislative heavyweights among its ranks. Check out the image below (click for a larger image).
In the image above I’ve highlighted all the members of the Tea Party Caucus who show up above the mid-leadership line. As expected they are also all concentrated to the far right. While these few representatives have established themselves as leaders of a small, partisan portion of the House, the true legislative leaders within the party are not members of the Tea Party Caucus and have actually attracted quite a bit of bipartisan support with their legislation. Check this out:
The two legislative leaders, Eric Cantor and Jim Gerlach, have garnered large amounts of bipartisan support for their legislation. Because of this, they have risen to the top. Now, it’s important to remember that Republicans in the House should not need any Democratic support to pass legislation due to their significant majority. So why is this bipartisanship occuring? I have a few ideas.
First Idea: When in the majority, legislators will have more of a tendency to attract bipartisan support. If a bill is sponsored by the majority party it has a higher chance of passing. As such, Democrats may be clinging onto legislation that is likely to pass, contains some good ideas, and is not overly offensive to their base.
Second Idea: Due to divisions within the Republican party, it has become necessary for Republicans to deal with Democrats in order to pass some important legislation. For instance, the Tea Party, with its libertarian tendencies, has forced some close votes on what would have been relatively safe votes in the old GOP, such as the vote to extend the Patriot Act, which only passed with Democratic support.
Likely it’s some combination of these two ideas that is causing this bipartisan leadership pattern among Republicans, along with a dash of some other factors I’m missing. Ultimately, this indicates that leadership from a less moderate caucus is possible when your party is in the minority, but it is hard to lead from a partisan caucus while in the majority. As members of the majority, the legislative heavyweight are by the nature of their majority position likely to attract more bipartisan support. At the same time the broader diversity of ideologies within the majority party requires occasional bipartisan efforts in order to pass legislation.
The Tea Party may see value in their ideological, partisan pursuits, but that does not (and probably cannot) result in legislative leadership, especially from within the majority.
- Jul 07, 11
The biggest political news of today is that Obama has signaled a willingness to make reductions to social security, medicare and medicaid in order to facilitate a “Grand Bargain” that will reduce the deficit by perhaps $4 trillion over the next decade. Liberals responded by sending a strong letter to Obama, signed by leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. What I’d like to show is how these Progressive leaders actually stack up legislatively and who in the Progressive caucus is really getting work done.
In the image above, I highlighted some of the legislators who signed the letter to Obama mentioned in the Politico article. They all fall squarely withing the left half of the diagram, as expected. Liberals are more likely to co-sponsor or sponsor Democratic legislation, after all. However, none of these legislators have strong legislative leadership records. In fact, the leader of the Progressive Caucus, Grijalva has the lowest leadership score of any legislator. Perhaps not surprisingly he also has the most Democratic partisanship score. This may demonstrate the difficulty of being an extreme partisan in the minority party. This may also be a reflection that, as the leader of a caucus, much of his work might not be legislative but more organizational or “behind-the-scenes”. But, surprisingly, the biggest Democratic heavyweight in the House are also members of the Progressive Caucus, the big three being Barbara Lee, Rosa DeLauro, and Lynn Woolsey, as shown in the image below.
As shown above, though some members of the Progressive Caucus may appear as relatively weak legislative leaders, Progressives also make up all of the Democratic leaders in Congress, where as those with more bipartisan tendencies tend to have little legislative power. I included the network lines to demonstrate that their legislative power derives almost entirely from their side of the aisle. What this demonstrates is that Progressives are the true power within the Democratic minority and Obama should probably be on friendly terms and take their letters to heart. This especially true if Dems manage to take back the house, which will likely catapult the Progressive Caucus to an even more powerful position as leaders of the majority. This also this sheds some light on the partisan atmosphere within Congress, and how legislative power in this environment can come almost entirely from within your own party.
This phenomenon is also reflected on the Republican side, which I will explore tomorrow.
- Jul 06, 11
Hey y’all (currently in Atlanta, y’know?),
So the impression is that this blog is done and gone, and my work on the Clear Congress Project is also finished. Not so! I’ve made a number of improvements over the past 2 months. I also want to explicitly outline some of the features I hope to implement soon!
Features Added
First I’ll talk about the passive interface elements I’ve added. The most important is the legend on the right hand side, which provides some immediate explanation. I also think it’s important to include some simple initial directions to the user, since it may be hard to determine that the scatter plot can be interacted with. I will likely change the cursor CSS for the entire canvas to imply more interactivity. In addition to this, I also added some middle lines across the chart to create quadrants. I will likely add the option to add/remove these. In addition, I changed the background color to black. I think it makes the details window pop more and makes the graphic a bit more dramatic. I want to give the user the ability to change between black and white, and also provide a color-blind viewing option, which affects around 2% of people and almost 8% of all men.
On the interactive side of things, I implemented a few viewing options, such as a jitter/reset option, as well as the ability to show/hide labels and the network graph. I’m still having some performance issues when collision is enabled, particularly with Firefox. I also added the ability to capture an image of the current state of the graphic. I felt that it was necessary to add a time element at the top of the canvas to automatically place each captured image in a temporal context. Currently it uses the user’s computer’s time, but I will probably make it standard Eastern time eventually. I haven’t implemented any new filtering options yet, but that leads me into the next section
What’s To Come
First, let’s talk filters. I plan on cleaning up the interface, making each element buttons instead of form checkboxes. This will be my first big change. Then I plan on adding more filters. Lots more. So many I’ll need to divide them up accordion style. First I want to add some flexible sliding-bar filters for the derived attributes: the partisanship score and the leader-follower score. I also want to add some sliding bars for experience in years as a legislator and for age. I’d also love to add income or wealth at some point, but that will require implementation of a new API, so this is likely a long-term goal. Finally, I’d like the ability to filter out all but those connected to the current revealed network.
Now, the largest feature I HAVE to implement is the ability to view changes through time. As one of the few people who check the view on a daily basis, the evolution over the past few months has been astonishing. Basically, the Republicans legislative stonewalling has forced the entire House more and more to the right, with a large number of Democrats now crossing the center partisanship line, some dramatically so. Being able to view these changes fluidly over time will have an incredible impact on the strength of the application, while at the same time creating a complete 365 image/year archive! Yes, I’m excited about this one. You should be too! I hope to complete this by the end of the summer, maybe sooner if I get someone to help me out!
Finally
I plan on blogging regularly starting today, likely linking an image from Clear Congress Project to a something I’ve read or some relevant news story. Just a head’s up.
- Apr 22, 11
Well, it’s one month later, and I’ve finished strong. The defense of the project went well, and I got some great feedback. Carl DiSalvo considered my ideology methodology a good first pass and suggested expanding upon it. I hope to do this in the future, but part of the problem was that the ideology axis was actually more a measure of partisanship. So I’ve changed that axis to partisanship. I also changed my methodology for determining partisanship slightly but will discuss this in the soon to come Methodology section.
I’ve added a lot more viewing options, the ability to show or hide the network. But I’ve realized that I need to reconsider the collision algorithm or just abandon it all together. It just causes too large of performance hit, especially if you’re also drawing an extensive network and labels. I’m going to instead consider a “jitter” function, which wound add some noise to each circle’s location with each button press.
But overall, the project has a very solid base. In the next week, I will be migrating the project to it’s new home at clearcongressproject.com. Posting might be limited this week, but look for the Methodology section and other updates to the structure of the blog.
A final thanks to my advisors on the project, Ian Bogost, Carl DiSalvo and Jannet Murray. My experience in the DM program has been life altering and was good to have access to such great minds throughout this sometimes rocky process.
- Mar 22, 11
I am now officially in a major crunch, as I attempt to bring this project up to the high standards I expect of myself. Though I’ve hit some rough patches in the past weeks, I’ve also made some significant progress. Check it out.
What I’m most proud of is the way that Processing, JavaScript, and now the APIs are beginning to all work together. Users can now click on a circle to get information about the represented legislator, along with their latest tweet. Their twitter ID is pulled from Sunlight Labs Congress API. As you can probably tell, it’s buggy right now. Only after clicking around a few times will the tweets update, and their currently a few clicks behind where they should be, but the basic premise is working. Synchronization is a big goal for this week.
My other major goal for this week is to setup my filtering options. The overview, though useful, is pretty crowded, and the user will have to have many options for filtering in order to make this tool more usable.
Stay tuned, because this project will be changing rapidly.
- Mar 09, 11
I’m still behind where I’d like to be, but you can check out my progress here.
This week I added collision to the legislators. They will slowly push away from each other if overlapping, starting from the scatter plot (political spectrum on the x, leader-follower score on the y). Soon the y-axis will be replaced with the Media Quotient (MQ), which I will explain later. I will also soon be tracking the connections between legislators through co-sponsorship, which will be displayed as tendrils between legislators and will also apply some light force to each other (creating natural clusters of co-sponsors and thereby, political factions). I’m still working on implementing the real-time feeds that will be available for each legislator (and how to display these feeds – I’m running out of pixels already!).
I also reworked the aesthetic, removing the alpha from the legislators. This may change later, or may be used to help highlight the user’s “focus legislator”.
- Feb 24, 11
Yeah, this is a bad news / good news post.
First: Progress.
Second, bad news. I spent most of yesterday attempting to get JavaScript and XML to play nice together. I was hoping to streamline my back-end this way but hit a roadblock when attempting to get the variables and arrays constructed from my XML pulls (via AJAX) to integrate into my Processing program. Due to using AJAX, I decided to just include jQuery, since I’m already somewhat familiar with it. But, in the end, I was unable to get past the Processing road block. I will probably continue to work on this in the future, but until I find a solution, I will continue with my PHP+SQL format.
Finally, good news. I’ve finally decided on a direction for my project (as long as it’s approved by my advisor). I hint at my final form with my current progress. I’ve decided to abandon historical data in favor of real-time data, in no small part due to the recent release of the Real-Time Congress API from Sunlight Labs. The visualization will now be an attempt to display the “political-media” zeitgeist, plotting legislators along a sort of scatter-plot with the political spectrum along the x-axis and derived “media quotient” along the y-axis. I’ll talk more about this media quotient later. The size of each legislator’s radius will be determined by their “political capital”, derived from the number of bills they are sponsoring. In this way, a viewer can see a real-time view of the political-media landscape.
The second portion of this application, underneath the visualization, will be links and feeds to the selected legislators various media mouthpieces – their C-Span, Twitter, and YouTube feeds, for instance. I also hope to include recent news stories related to them.
Perhaps the aspect I’m most excited about, however, is including some basic physics into the visualization. The legislators will then be bumping into each other, crowding out each other’s space within this political-media landscape. Furthermore, I hope to, when a legislator is selected, release “tendrils” from that legislators which will connect to other legislators based on their co-sponsorship of bills (info available from the Real Time API), and possible if they are mentioned in another persons speech (AND possibly also representing committee relationships). Whether or not these tendrils will also have a basic physics… well, I’d like to. Here’s hoping that there’s time.
In this way I think my visualization will both be a useful tool for journalists and political junkies to get a real-time, aggregated view of the political-media landscape. At the same time, I hope it will serve in some ways as a criticism of the importance media now plays in political power. More on this later.
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Info
- Data Visualization and Dashboard Consultant / DeveloperInformation Technology and Services | Greater Atlanta Area, USSummary
• Dashboard & Data Visualization Consultant and Developer with experience in web development, graphic design, and quality assurance.
• Over 6 years of development and design experience.
• Proven self-motivator with experience in every stage of project development.
• Substantial research and writing experience.Specialties: dashboards, data visualization, interface design, web design & development, user experience evaluation, graphic design, game design, critical reviews, bloggin'Experience- Aug 2011 - PresentDashboard Developer / Consultant / ProMorphics
PwC (PricewaterhouseCooper) – Custom Visualization
Dashboard Architect
• Adapted SAP technologies to build a custom interactive visualization utilizing an untraditional data set.
• Conducted requirement gathering meeting with client.
• Developed experimental prototype for non-traditional dashboard project.
• Developed multiple prototypes with mock data to finalize design.
• Identified and implemented 3rd-party component to enable connection to untraditional data source.
• Captured security requirements and offered multiple security solutions.
• Leveraged graphic design skillset to reduce project costs by eliminating the need to hire another designer.
• Engaged IT department to determine and enact hosting and connectivity.
• Established process for hassle-free manual updates.
• Ran testing session with live data to establish quality assurance.
• Project completed ahead of schedule and under budget.Blount International – Financial Dashboard
Dashboard Architect
• Rebuilt dashboard from ground-up based off a legacy, Excel-based model.
• Collaborated on a requirement gathering session with client and identified stakeholders.
• Developed working, interactive mock-ups with provided sample data.
• Expanded drill-down capabilities, providing 4 new options across all company divisions.
• Implemented new filtering and interactivity options for each graph and chart.
• Conducted multiple feedback sessions to further refine dashboard’s design and functionality.
• Implemented a 3rd-party component to demonstrate enhanced dashboard capabilities.
• Attended and answered questions at dashboard presentation to C-level executives. - Jul 2010 - Jul 2011Project Architect / Clear Congress Project
Project Architect
• Developed an interactive web-based visualization utilizing streaming, real-time data and a variety of web technologies.
• Identified suitable data sources and retrieval methods.
• Created a database and data retrieval utilizing SQL and PHP.
• Utilized open source JavaScript libraries to enable animation and speed up development.
• Created connections to real-time data sources using jQuery, AJAX and JSON to retrieve on-demand data from various public APIs.
• Composed over 20 pages of accompanying technical and theoretical documentation
• Planned and presented accompanying 20 minute presentation.
• Created and provided content for accompanying project blog.
• Received grant-funding and recognition within the professional visualization community. - Oct 2009 - May 2011Research Assistant / Georgia Institute of Technology
• Contributed to DARPA-funded research project in collaboration with SAIC and Georgia Institute of Technology.
• Conducted comparative evaluation of online social environments.
• Conducted over 100+ hours of ethnographic evaluation within virtual environments.
• Composed over 100+ pages of ethnographic field notes.
• Coded field notes by project-established standards to prepare documents for computationally-driven evaluation.
• Identified new methods for subject recruitment.
• Designed recruitment banner ads and Facebook advertisements. - Sept 2007 - Jul 2009Development Quality Assurance / Volition
Lead Tester - Cooperative Gameplay, Saints Row 2
- Trained, managed, and evaluated a large team (20+) of quality assurance testers
- interacted and coordinated daily with producers, developers, and designers
- personally identified and reported over 700 product defects
Lead Tester - Multiplayer Gameplay, WWE Legends
- led a small team of testers on an internationally outsourced project
- coordinated online testing with cross-country testing facilities
Development Tester - Singleplayer Gameplay, Red Faction
Guerrilla
- Responsible for standards, critical path, and end-game content - Jun 2003 - Feb 2006Manager / Kafein Cafe
- Responsible for front-of-the-house operations for a popular local small business
- Increased revenue by creating and hosting a weekly open mic night - Sept 2001 - Feb 2003Graphic / Web Designer / Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art
- Designed fliers, playbills and advertisements for art shows, movie screenings and other other museum events
- Maintained official museum webpage with over 100k+ yearly views
Education-
2009 - 2011Georgia Institute of TechnologyMaster of Science in Digital Media
Activities: GVU -
1999 - 2005Northwestern UniversityBachelor of Science in Communications
Activities: Niteskool Productions, Theta Chi Fraternity, Block Museum of Art
Additional Information-
Websites:
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Honors:Quarter Finalist - 2009 BlueCat Screenplay Competition Featured Musician/Songwriter - 2006 Best Music Video, Chicago Community Cinema
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Interests:visualizations, politics, video games, guitar
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