I wrote a data story on the policy ideas that made their way into four key bills related to the financial crisis.
The link to the article is below:
Tracing Policy Idea Trajectories in Congress
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010
Wow, what a cool analysis. For one, it’s really interesting to see how these various bills get combined into major legislation, and then of course see how in some cases that means we are looking at years worth of policy ideas, whereas in others it all comes together rather quickly. It would be great to look at these sections that stand the test of time in terms of being debated and revised versus the overnight additions and understand which are more controversial or effective in resultant policy.
The obvious critique of your piece is that the dot graphs are a bit hard to make heads or tails of when you first look at them. You really need some time to wrap your head around what they are conveying, which doesn’t make for very consumer-friendly journalism digestion. Would love to brainstorm alternative ways of presenting this information, or perhaps summary graphs that give us a sense of the final composition of the bills with dates attached to their original proposal.
Great William – on the Sankey note – you might also want to look at History Flow which is an amazing visualization of how wikipedia entries come together:
http://www.bewitched.com/historyflow.html