Comments on: Tracing Policy Idea Trajectories in Congress https://partnews.mit.edu/2014/04/01/tracing-policy-idea-trajectories-in-congress/ Treating newsgathering as an engineering problem... since 2012! Wed, 02 Apr 2014 17:44:02 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2 By: catherine https://partnews.mit.edu/2014/04/01/tracing-policy-idea-trajectories-in-congress/#comment-29729 Wed, 02 Apr 2014 17:44:02 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=4490#comment-29729 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

]]> By: Erhardt https://partnews.mit.edu/2014/04/01/tracing-policy-idea-trajectories-in-congress/#comment-29717 Wed, 02 Apr 2014 16:28:38 +0000 http://partnews.brownbag.me/?p=4490#comment-29717 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.

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