Political Hacks

Cameron Marlow spoke at the Berkman Center about political hacks -- "clever solutions to interesting problems." Marlow, a student at the MIT Media Lab, described how basic technology can make political information accessible, useful, and interactive. For example, the site Fundrace uses data that is already available in the public domain and allows people to examine campaign contributions by neighborhood or donor's name. Marlow built a tool for analyzing the language of the presidential debates. He used a few "perl widgets" to parse transcripts of the debates. The result -- a site that lets you browse candidates' key phrases (compare North Korea and "hard work"). Learn more from Marlow's list of links about political hacks.