Methodology
Capitol Words are determined by capturing the full text of the House, Senate and Extension of Remarks sections of the Congressional Record for every day, dating back to the second session of the 106th Congress (January 20, 2000), via GPO Access and storing it on Sunlight's LOUIS database. Sunlight then runs a query on LOUIS to calculate the most commonly used words for a given day, with some exceptions, (described in more detail below). Each afternoon, the daily counts for the previous day are added to the Capitol Words database. Then Sunlight runs queries in the Capitol Words database to determine the most commonly used words by lawmaker and state.
The word count calculated by Sunlight does not include the Daily Digest section in the Congressional Record. This section summarizes the daily activities of Congress. The word count also excludes several sets of commonly used words that do not have substantive meaning. This includes words of two letters or less, a list of common congressional procedural words that was determined by Sunlight and a list of commonly used 'stop-words'. (Stop-words are terms that are commonly ignored by search engines and other data indexers to ensure that only valuable content is queried.) 'Capitol Words' stop-word list is based on the stop-word list provided by the text indexing engine, Onix, in its full indexing toolkit. Capitol Words' list of stop-words is dynamic and may be modified, as needed.
(Please note we are in the process updating the data for a small number of lawmakers. They will be clearly identified on their profile page.)
Lawmakers
Heat Map of Vocal States
Words of the Day
- 100% 474 health
- 100% 429 plan
- 100% 333 care
- 100% 278 date
- 100% 211 insurance
- 100% 198 service
- 100% 184 tax
- 100% 178 apply
- 100% 176 percent
- 100% 169 clause
- 100% 161 station
- 100% 155 amount
- 100% 151 credit
- 100% 149 period
- 100% 147 local
- 100% 143 community
- 100% 143 public
- 100% 143 respect
- 100% 141 satellite
- 100% 140 code