Capitol Words API

Getting started

Listed below are the public methods currently supported by the Capitol Words API. All requests must be signed with a valid Sunlight labs API key. You can register for one here: http://services.sunlightlabs.com/accounts/register

Discussion & Bugs

Sunlight API discussion takes place at the sunlightlabs-api-discuss google group. You can ask questions there, as well as alert the maintainers of bugs. If you have specific issues with the Capitol Words API, you can open a ticket directly at github.

Endpoints

All endpoints below are relative to this page, the API root. So, to make a request to the dates.json endpoint, you'd use the url http://capitolwords.org/api/1/dates.json?apikey=<YOUR_KEY>.

Standard arguments

All of the endpoints pulling from Solr support a set of standard arguments, all of which are optional. Endpoints with support for standard arguments will be flagged as such below.

dates.json

Find the popularity of a phrase over a period of time. Standard arguments are supported.

Required arguments

Optional arguments

Examples

Results

Returns a list of date objects with associated mention data

{
    "results": [
        {
            "count": 14.0,
            "percentage": 0.058309037900874633,
            "total": 24010,
            "day": "1996-01-02",
            "raw_count": 14.0
        },
        {
            "count": 122.0,
            "percentage": 0.067791336044986786,
            "total": 179964,
            "day": "1996-01-04",
            "raw_count": 122.0
        },
        {
            "count": 198.0,
            "percentage": 0.13499693188791165,
            "total": 146670,
            "day": "1996-01-05",
            "raw_count": 198.0
        },
        {
            "count": 1.0,
            "percentage": 0.098135426889106966,
            "total": 1019,
            "day": "1996-01-08",
            "raw_count": 1.0
        },
        ...
    ]
}

phrases.json

List the top phrases for a facet.

Required arguments

Optional arguments

Examples

Results

Returns a list of phrases with tf-idf and count data

[
    {
        "tfidf": 3.8596557124800003e-05,
        "count": 5373,
        "ngram": "people"
    },
    {
        "tfidf": 1.30267768302e-05,
        "count": 3637,
        "ngram": "one"
    },
    {
        "tfidf": 2.52066478599e-05,
        "count": 3509,
        "ngram": "jobs"
    },
    {
        "tfidf": 1.17409333103e-05,
        "count": 3278,
        "ngram": "american"
    },
    ...
]

phrases/{entity}.json

Get the top (legislator|state|party|bioguide_id|volume|chamber)s for a phrase. Standard arguments are supported.

Required arguments

Optional arguments

Examples

Results

Returns a list of entity objects with associated count data

{
    "results": [
        {
            "count": 41.0,
            "chamber": "House"
        },
        {
            "count": 35.0,
            "chamber": "Senate"
        },
        {
            "count": 9.0,
            "chamber": "Extensions"
        }
    ]
}

text.json

Full-text search. Standard arguments are supported

Required arguments

No single argument is required to this endpoint; however, at least one of the text search arguments should be supplied.

Text search arguments

Optional arguments

Examples

Results

Returns a list of CR Documents and the total number found

{
    "num_found": 347,
    "results": [
        {
            "speaker_state": "NC",
            "speaker_first": "Virginia",
            "congress": 111,
            "title": "CULTIVATING AMERICAN ENERGY RESOURCES",
            "origin_url": "http://origin.www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CREC-2009-07-30/html/CREC-2009-07-30-pt1-PgH9197.htm",
            "number": 117,
            "pages": "H9197-H9203",
            "volume": 155,
            "chamber": "House",
            "session": 1,
            "speaking": [
                "Well, I think that this is a great segue to talk about the other subject that we wanted to talk about tonight, which is health care, and what is happening with the health care debate."
            ],
            "capitolwords_url": "http://capitolwords.org/date/2009/07/30/H9197_cultivating-american-energy-resources/",
            "speaker_party": "R",
            "date": "2009-07-30",
            "bills": null,
            "bioguide_id": "F000450",
            "order": 14,
            "speaker_last": "Foxx",
            "speaker_raw": "ms. foxx"
        },
        ...
    ]
}