carrinacongress: information visualization techniques to compare online identities of the members of...
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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
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: [email protected]: @AthirMahmud Blog: www.athir.com