This is kind of cool - at least to me - from several angles.
Tracking the Congressional attention span
Researchers wanted to know several things: how do elected leaders distribute their attention? Under what circumstances do leaders push or follow public attention to an issue? Is debate on most issues incremental or explosive? Now that they could accurately track topics over time, the researchers found, for instance, that "judicial nominations" have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004. In fact, the topic produced the most number of words published in a single "day" of the Congressional Record: 230,000 on November 12, 2003.
Another hot issue, abortion, has moved in the other direction. Abortion has steadily received less Congressional attention over the last decade, and floor speeches on abortion now remain stable at one percent of the total (down from six percent in the 105th Congress).
There are hundreds of fascinating ways to slice and dice this massive chunk of data; it gets most interesting, for instance, when the researchers match up spikes and lulls in certain topics with specific news items or political events. (For those interested in such things, section four of the paper makes for excellent reading.)
Section four - for those of you still reading - is the results of the analysis for the 105th -108th Senate. Section 4.3.3 is particularly interesting - Intervention Analysis: 9/11. <heh>
Anyways, you can read the whole report via PDF here, yourself. As I said, very cool stuff. Well worth the read.
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