Feed Subscriptions
Rolling Links
- The Media Laboratory, MIT
- Science Blogs
- Electro^Plankton A blog about design, technology, music and fashion.
- Open Code Blog - New York Times A blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers.
- Technology Review The authority on the future of technology
Political contributions can get very confusing. Although required to make their funding public, it can seem as though the government and parties try to make it as hard to understand as possible. Unfluence tries to single handedly compile all the info and place it in an easy to understand display, with some success; Unfluence won the first prize in the Sunlight Foundation Mashup competition. The site lets you design your own query, with variables including state, year, office, source of contributions, and minimum amount of contribution. Unfluence has decent explanation of the complicated picture that shows up so I’ll let them explain:
Circles indicate candidates running for a political office. Green circles represent their contributors. Gray arrows (a.k.a “links” or “edges”) indicate the size and direction of contributions (thicker arrows mean more $.) The size of the circles (”nodes” or “vertices”) is proportional to the total amount given or received. Modifying the query selects different groups of candidates and ranges of edges to be included when building the network. Clicking on nodes gives access to additional summary information about candidates in an info bubble.
The end result: Still Confusing
While it does aggregate all the information, Unfluence makes many mistakes. First of all, not all the politicians have complete bio’s, which makes that whole part of the project not very useful. Second of all, they themselves say not to trust all of their data. They collect it from The National Institute on: Money in State Politics who gather their info from government data, so details might get lost in translation. Unfluence advises users to “Consider anything you find here an illustrative example, and go back through the data before you make any strong conclusions.” Lastly, the visualization itself is unintelligible. Even in small states such as the picture of Maine above it is hard to see everything that is going on, and once you get to the bigger states such as California, it is clearly a task for a professional analysis.
This product is still in alpha testing, so there will probably be fixes coming out, but as of now, don’t look to Unfluence for any enlightenment.