Untangling the Webs of Immigration Lobbying

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For our June Meetup, we're thrilled to have three researchers from the Sunlight Foundation talk about a recent data science project. They analyzed 7,814 lobbying reports related to immigration bills in Congress, and used that data to build an outstanding network analysis and interactive visualization. (To see the full version, click here (http://sunlight-embed.s3.amazonaws.com/2013/03/immigration_network/index.html).) Lee Drutman will frame the question that they tried to answer, then Zander Furnas will get into the nitty-gritty of the analysis and visualization, and Amy Cesal will talk about how they gave the results a compelling and informative visual design. You'll learn about tools like Latent Semantic Analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis), Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_clustering), Gephi (https://gephi.org/), and sigma.js (http://sigmajs.org/), and maybe a little bit about lobbying too!

Agenda:

6:30pm -- Networking, Empenadas, and Refreshments 7:00pm -- Introduction 7:15pm -- Presentations and discussion 8:30pm -- Post presentation conversations 8:45pm -- Adjourn for Data Drinks (Tonic, 22nd & G St.) Bios:

Amy Cesal (http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/acesal/) is a graphic designer at the Sunlight Foundation. Prior to joining Sunlight, she worked at a small design studio in Adams Morgan as a web and print designer. Amy graduated from American University with a major in graphic design and a minor in marketing. Follow her on Twitter at @amycesal (http://twitter.com/amycesal).

Lee Drutman (http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/ldrutman/) is a Senior Fellow at the Sunlight Foundation and adjunct professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and the University of California. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley and a B.A. from Brown University. He has been quoted by NPR, ABC News, The Colbert Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, The Hill, Roll Call, among many other news outlets.

Alexander Furnas (http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/afurnas/) is a Research Fellow at the Sunlight Foundation. He graduated from Wesleyan University's College of Social Studies (CSS) with a B.A. in Social Studies, and holds an MSc. (oxon) with Distinction in the Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford, UK. Prior to joining the Sunlight Foundation, Alexander worked as a research fellow at the Center for Legislative Research and Advocacy in Delhi, India, on national innovation policy.

Parking:

For those driving, we encourage you to find parking for this event via our sponsor, ParkMe (http://www.parkme.com/). ParkMe will help you find the closest, cheapest parking, and has iPhone (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/parkme-parking-find-cheapest/id417605484?mt=8) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parkme.consumer) apps.