Non-profit uses big data to track big government

The Sunlight Foundation, a non-profit aimed at showing how corporate interests influence government released a pretty sweet tool for citizens and big data nerds.

The tool, called Capitol Words monitors how often and which legislators said certain phrases in an effort to track how those phrases enter and influence the political debate. Capitol Words is one of those random tools that gives us a glimpse of how cheap computing and better data analytics can change the business as usual in politics. Already the combo of cheap computing and big data are changing how retail firms set prices, offering insights into healthcare, and helping investors maximize rental income, so the notion that it could lead to more government transparency is not all that crazy. In the case of Capitol Words and the Sunlight Foundation, the goal is to analyze what legislators say on the floor of the House and Senate to track how an idea can filter through a political party, a region or a debate by parsing the text data generated daily by the Congressional Record.