Comment 1
Comment 2
References:
Title: Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Visual Oversight
Authors: Peter Kinnaird, Mario Romero, and Gregory Abowd
Venue: CHI EA 2010, April 10-15, 2010
Summary:
In this paper, the authors describe a web application they created called Connect 2 Congress, as well as how this software will allow better analysis of politicians' voting practices. Connect 2 Congress is a web application coded in PHP, MySQL, Java, and Javascript; it displays voting data over a user-determined period of time. There are two different graphs for the house and senate for each bill, and a graph in four quadrants shows each representative's liberal or conservative stance, as well as a leader or follower index, which shows how much they had to do with introducing bills. Furthermore, users can choose to highlight individual representatives or search by name or state. The authors hope that this application could be helpful to political strategists and journalists, and they go on to mention that they believe it would be too complicated for the average voter.Discussion:
While the paper itself is solid, I think the application misses its target in a way. To me, a web application means you're trying to reach a large audience, but the application itself is too complex for a regular person, even though they mention that they aren't the target in the paper. Instead, I think I would focus on making this application for desktops, since newspeople and analysts that they mentioned as the target audience have powerful computers that could probably crunch the numbers in closer to real-time (a problem they mentioned.)
(Picture courtesy of: VA Watchdog)
This would be a very practical program to use for voters to see what a politicians voting record have been during their term. I agree that if it is too complex for basic people to understand then it will never really have much appeal.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I agree with your view that it's better suited to be a desktop application. The Internet's useful for this sort of information retrieval, and by having it online professionals can access it on their work computers without having to have IT approve a new piece of software, etc.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing inherently wrong with being domain specific. However, this project most likely tried to cover too many groups at once, so maybe they could have improved the site more by focusing solely on politicians, journalists, or social scientists specifically.
I'm not so sure that this really needs to be a desktop application. Even if it is solely aimed at professionals, why should that matter? It's essentially just data retrieval.
ReplyDelete