Just as “pitchers and catchers report” in the Spring, voters step up for the primary elections. Chicagotalks.org and Congressionalprimaries.org bring you a fun, novel, and useful interactive tool that presents the “who’s who” for all the congressional primaries held across Illinois’ 18 congressional districts on March 20, 2012, including where your own district.
If you follow baseball, now is the time to see which players have been traded, and who has joined the roster. For players who are just up from the minor leagues, sports reporters do profiles and list their stats. Chicago voters can turn to Chicagotalks.org for the line-up during the pre-season, pre-election weeks ahead at our Voter Scorecard Page.
Check out the “what the candidate tweets” application that analyzes the content of the tweets and categorizes each tweet by political topic thanks to data wizard, Shawn O’Banion.
The site also tracks a “what the followers tweet” analysis of the content by creator Patrick McNally. Since candidates’ followers don’t Tweet as consistently about campaign issues, analyzing that Tweet stream for political trends hasn’t worked out as well as following the candidates’ tweets.
In Chicago voting is a sport, like baseball, basketball, hockey, football and futbol. Local voters will choose the next team of legislators for Illinois at the March 20th primary election.
Voters need a scorecard to figure out who is running, and to keep track of your district or to explore your “fantasy legislature,” where all the elected officials are on the up and up, understand economic and social challenges facing Chicago and Illinois, and are out to represent the interests of people, not those other “people,” corporations.
A quick click will let you get busy and create a state-wide fantasy league– I mean fantasy legislature– or to see who is running in your district.
Come November, we will face the challenge of the reapportionment and redistricting associated with the census but the site will be closed shortly after the March 20 primary. We encourage Knight News Innovation Lab to bring it back for the next election cycle.
Congressionalprimaries.org is a project from the Knight News Innovation Lab. By monitoring digital activity associated with all of these races, and our new feature uses that data and their expertise to help voters learn more about the candidates.
It opens up new information in three key areas: insights and trends from analyzing social media such as Facebook and Twitter, easy-to-understand narratives that can be told through campaign finance data, and the discovery of additional relevant information through automated aggregations.
Contributor analysis provides insight into the geographical location of campaign contributors and maps contributions by zip code from within Illinois.
If the tech side of this site is your angle on the story, look at their blog to find out the details at Illinois Congressional Primaries | Knight News Innovation LabCongressionalPrimaries.org | Blog.
The Lab was created in 2011 with a grant from the Knight Foundation. Additional funding for this project was provided by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
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