Tools for visualizing person records
This page contains a demo for visualizing records from people in the United States Fourteenth Amendment & The Civil Rights Act of 1866 Convention data set from the Quill Project Database. The page consists of five main elements: a committee involvement list, a keyword cloud, a relationship map, an event list, and a voting breakdown.
This page shows visualization components using a static sample of person + committee from the dataset, namely Thaddeus Stevens and The House of Representatives. The Quill platform allows interactive selection of different committees or people to visualize, which can be seen here.
Committee Involvement
The committee involvement section displays a person’s participation in different committees of a convention. The colored donuts show the percentage of events in the committee in which the person in mentioned by name, and the number within refers to the total amount. Committees with no participation from the person are shown in gray. The following sections will visualize the person’s participation in the committee shown with a red outline.
Person's committee involvements
Keyword Cloud
From a given committee, we search for keywords in its event descriptions that can be used to indicate topics that were discussed. While the Quill platform has support for recording keywords, we use Yake to collect them when they are not available. Keywords are shown in a keyword cloud format, with a chart underneath indicating scores for the 20 most frequent keywords. Hovering over a score will highlight the word in the cloud, and vice-versa.
Keywords related to involved committees
Relationship Map
For each committee, we generate a relationship map to show other people that may be politically aligned with the person in question. Relationships are estimated by calculating distances between votes along all sessions in the committee. The 2D projection of the relationship map is generated with t-SNE. Below the relationship map are shown the 5 people with alignment most similar to the person (allies) and the 5 people who are the most opposed (opponents). The number listed on each person’s name indicates the distance between them and the selected person, from 0 to 1.
Person's relationships in committee
Event List
Using the icons present in the Quill platform, a timeline of events in the committee is built over the course of its sessions. Each line is a session occurring on a different day, over which a sequence of event icons are laid out. Events in which the person has participated are shown in higher opacity. By default, only sessions with at least one event participation from the person are shown.
: 0 sessions, 0 events. appears in 0 events.
Voting Breakdown
This display shows a breakdown of all voting and general decisions in the committee. Multiple decisions can be grouped into sessions, as they occurred in the same day. For each decision, the total of votes is displayed, according to each category: in favor, against, uncertain, or abstentions. The person’s choice in each of these votes is highlighted. A second person can also be chosen to compare votes, which is shown below: