Hamilton Project

A data analysis and visualization project providing insight into legislative branch spending.

The goals of this project are to:

Clean up publicly available disbursement data to make it easier for reporters, elected officials, constituents, anyone to understand how money is being spent.

Match and consolidate like vendors
Catch and fix misspellings

Visualize data to provide insight into the breakdown of expenditures. Some simple calculations could include:

Spending by Member
Amount received by Vendor
Compensation by Staff Title

Deliverables

A well-documented methodology for cleaning data
A stable and reliable single .csv for further exploration
A flexible data visualization tool
A detailed explanation for all expenses by office and category

NOTE: This is an educational experiment designed to provide some beneficial insight.

MVP deployed June 9, 2017

D3 Visualization of Top 25 Vendors from 2017 Q1 Statement of Disbursements

Technologies Used

Python
Javascript

Libraries Used

Pandas.py
React.js
D3.js

Other Tools Used

Jupyter Notebook for data analysis (To see notebook, go here).

Inspiration/Resources

Data Source: http://disbursements.house.gov/archive.shtml

Statements of Disbursement Data Set

Josh Tauberer and Daniel Schuman
Congress Tech Spending by The OpenGov Foundation
Processing House Disbursements by Sunlight Foundation, now ProPublica
Legislative Branch Capacity Working Group by Lee Drutman and Kevin Kosar
Congressional Operations Research by Congressional Management Foundation

Data Visualization/D3

Campaign Expenditures by Colin Kearns
For getting me up and running, Takayuki Ito