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Workflows

Main Workflows

There are 4 main Code for Democracy workflows, which comprise the core of our search, visualization, and alerting tools:
  1. 1.
    Create a List — You can start here to build your own custom analysis or skip this workflow entirely if you just want to use the pre-loaded content. Our list creation workflow aims to make it easy to define groups of entities (candidates, donors, terms, etc.) to investigative.
  2. 2.
    Create a Query — Queries are the core of our bulk search capabilities. Each query uses a recipe, which is a specific search formula optimized for our datasets. By creating a query, you're creating a search that can be run again in the future with just one click.
  3. 3.
    Create a Visualization — This workflow takes the results from a query and formats it in customizable ways before sending it to a visualization engine. This workflow aims to make it easy to re-create visualizations when new data is available.
  4. 4.
    Create an Alert — Alerts let you know when new results are available for a query, or perhaps when no results have been available for awhile. When an alert is triggered, our platform will send you an email with a link to the new data.

Mini-Tools

There are 3 Code for Democracy mini-tools, which combine exploratory with advanced discovery capabilities in order to aid in the creation of lists:
  1. 1.
    Explore Lists — A quick way to define new lists is to look at lists that have already been defined, and then clone them in order to add your own customizations.
  2. 2.
    Explore Relationships — This tool helps you explore connections between entities in our datasets in two different ways. It's meant to help brainstorm entities to add to your lists.
  3. 3.
    Explore Documents — Our topic lists are basically ontologies, and creating them can be complex. You can test how terms appear in documents using this tool.