sunlightlabs/Capitol-Words — Issue #45: copy edits to about page
Author: sbma44
Created: 2011-10-28 21:33:35+00:00
State: open

Words/phrases over time

The graphs on the Capitol Words site that show the occurrences of words and phrases over time do so by using the relative frequency of the word or phrase. That is, the number of times the given word or phrase occurred divided by the total number of words or phrases of that size for that time period, multiplied by 100. This gives a better idea of how popular a term really was because it takes into account how much action there was in Congress in that time period.

Popular words/phrases

To calculate the top words and phrases for each entity, Capitol Words uses a weighted formula similar to term frequency–inverse document frequency. This formula gives a higher weight to words and phrases used more frequently by the given entity than by others.