Oil Money Networks

You can follow the oil money at this website.

I found out about this one from an e-mail that Skye Bender-de Moll sent to the SocNet mailing list:

"Dear Friends,

I've been involved in a project by the non-profit Oil Change
International to create interactive network visualizations of U.S.
federal campaign contributions from the Oil and Gas industries. The
website has finally been officially launched, and I think some of you
might be have fun exploring the networks:

http://oilmoney.priceofoil.org

The goal was to create accessible visual summaries of ~80,000
contributions, displayed in network and drillable/sortable tabular
forms for both chambers of Congress and presidential races from 2000
to 2008. The network images are bipartite graphs of companies and
politicians, linked by arcs giving contribution amounts. Clicking on
nodes gives additional information. Companies are actually
aggregations of giving by company Political Action Committees and
individuals' declared affiliations. Networks can be thresholded by
quartile ranges independently for edges, companies, and politicians.


The data come from U.S. Federal Election Commission filings, cleaned
and categorized by the Center for Responsive Politics, and includes
links to the actual filing receipts to document each contribution. We
have also integrated the data with a crude industry support voting
score based on selected energy and climate congressional votes. We
may be able to make formatted network and attribute data available to
researchers who are interested in working with Oil Change
International to do more rigorous and sophisticated forms of
statistical analysis. (...)

Technical note for those interested: The site is built from open
source components in PHP and javascript/AJAX. The coordinates for
the layouts are produced using the Kamada-Kawai layout implementation
in the GraphViz neato package. The Graphviz community was kind enough
to make some modifications to their code to assist us. Additional data
for id linking and voting came from GovTrack.us and the Sunlight Labs
API."