Hamilton Project

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

The goals of this project are to:

1. 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

2. 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

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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.

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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