Political ads

John Sheffield Beebe-West

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You can see this in action, here.

This repository includes the ability to visualize and manipulate data about political ads. The data used here is from the Political TV Ad Archive. While I have not included the seed data, to replicate the dataset, you need only head over to their data download page and download both "details of ad airings on TV" and "list of unique ads archived". Save the details of ad airings as /data/seed/instances.csv and save the unique ads as /data/seed/ads.csv. Then run the four scripts in /scripts/ folder:

• node scripts/01-write-sponsor-list.js
• After you run this, cp data/sponsors-raw.csv data/sponsors.csv
• Add the party to data/sponsors.csv
• node scripts/02-write-party-candidate-and-subject-counts.js
• node scripts/03/write-candidate-instances.js
• node scripts/04/write-subject-instances.js

Once you have done that, you have .csv and .json files in the /data/ folder, which you can use as you see fit.

If you wish to visualize the data, first install the node module http-server globally:

• npm install -g http-server
• `cd charts/
• http-server
• navigate to http://localhost:8080

Ta-da.

The visualization javascript is rough, and I would love some PRs.

Note, I included the when the candidates dropped out of the race. I got that data from the Atlantic.