Hey all! I just wanted to see if anyone else might be interested in working with legislative data in Julia. In particular I'm interested in trying to do some language processing on the text of bills in the House and Senate - I figured there might be some existing projects out there?!
I've been working a bit with MapLight <http://maplight.org/>, they have interesting data about how much money has been spent on lobbying for or against a particular bill. There are more details on their site, but the thing that strikes me is that they're doing all of the research by hand (which seems like it would be crazy laborious). I would like at least to automate the process of identifying lobbying groups that might have taken a position on a given bill - probably by analyzing the bill's text and trying to pull out industries, etc. In the mean time I threw together MapLight.jl <https://github.com/WestleyArgentum/MapLight.jl> to make the existing API a little easier to use - check it out and let me know what you think!
