To understand current trends in politics and public policy, it is helpful to examine the concerns of congress in the past, and to study how they have changed over time. Using Congress by Year, it is possible to see proportional trends for bills, laws and Congressional Record citations.
It is also possible to visually compare one search against another.
Results for each year in a search are extracted from the govinfo database and compared with that year's total. The resulting proportion is then plotted on an interactive graph. Proportions are used instead of raw numbers in order to give a more accurate appraisal of trends.
Indexing for years may vary in quality (particularly for earlier years of the bound Congressional Record)
Congress by Year is an experimental project of Ed Sperr, M.L.I.S.
Ed can be reached at ed_sperr@hotmail.com or esperr@uga.edu.
Congress by Year powered by jQuery. Govinfo does not a public API as yet, so a custom webservice is used to fetch the JSON that provides the yearly counts. Google Charts is used to draw the charts and responsive layout is made easier with Bootstrap.
You can find the source code for this application at GitHub.
Please note that the information provided here comes ultimately from the Government Printing Office.
The code underlying this application is Public Domain, but if you use Congress by Year for publication, I'd appreciate a citation:
Sperr E. Congress by Year [Internet]. 2018 [cited your_date_here]. Available from http://esperr.github.io/congress-by-year/
Want to have even more fun with visualization of congressional data? Check out Committee Flow and Members by Interest