Capitol Words: A Dashboard for Exploring Congressional Records

An interactive dashboard that empowers users to search and understand the context of political discussions, promoting civic engagement and transparency.

Background

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom focused on investigative journalism and government accountability. Chartbeat provides real-time analytics tools for newsrooms. Together, we partnered to make congressional discourse more searchable and accessible to the public.

Problem

Understanding what Congress is talking about is hard: political language is dense, transcripts are massive, and most tools aren’t designed for everyday readers. ProPublica and Chartbeat wanted to give people a way to search congressional records by topic and quickly understand who was saying what—without needing to wade through thousands of pages.

Approach

My focus was to make complex, data-heavy information feel approachable to a broad audience. I worked iteratively with ProPublica’s journalists and Chartbeat’s engineers to align on editorial integrity, user needs, and technical constraints. We tested early concepts and refined the experience based on feedback, prioritizing clarity, speed, and trust.

Solution

I designed an interactive web dashboard that enabled users to:

1. Search by topic (e.g., “climate change,” “immigration”)

2. See which members of Congress discussed it

3. Explore the surrounding context to understand how the topic was framed

The interface combined search, filtering, and lightweight visualizations to help users navigate thousands of records without feeling overwhelmed.

Outcome

The tool became part of ProPublica’s civic engagement toolkit, providing an accessible way for the public to explore political discourse and advancing ProPublica’s mission of government transparency. It also served as a strong example of how interactive journalism can turn public data into something people can actually use.