Politics

Sunlight Creates Database of Members? Expenditures

By John Wonderlich

We’ve put up a new database.

On Monday, the House published their Statements of Disbursements online for the first time, giving us a new digital view into how the US House spends public funds.

Today, the Sunlight Foundation is releasing a searchable database of members’ expenditures, one dataset within the broader PDF released earlier this week.

Since the expenses were released in a PDF, they’re difficult to search or analyze. Large datasets like this are best accessed as data, where sorting and grouping make patterns visible, and alternative visualizations possible.

That’s why we’ve digitized some of the document’s contents — to make them more meaningful and accessible.

To understand what the numbers mean, we recommend consulting the materials presented on disbursements.house.gov, which has been lauded for its completeness.

We’ll have much more to share on this data soon, from many different angles.

Update: Here’s coverage from Sunlight’s Real Time Investigations.

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on December 02, 2009 (boomark / email).