UW News

January 23, 2015

John Wilkerson’s Legislative Explorer honored, paper published

UW News

The online Legislative Explorer, the big-data policy project by John Wilkerson and Nicholas Stramp of the UW political science department, has been named an award of excellence winner in interactive design by Communication Arts, an international trade journal of visual communications.

Their website, www.legex.org, which tracks all Congressional legislation in the last 40 years, also was named among the 18 best infographics of 2014 by the business magazine Fast Company. That magazine featured the site among “stellar examples of the power of data visualization.” The item ran under the headline “What the hell does Congress do all day?”

Stramp, a graduate student, and Wilkerson, a professor and director of the UW’s Center for American Politics and Public Policy, have also published their research paper on the work this month in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics. They collaborated with the Seattle-based creative design and technology studio Schema to create the website.