Feedback on my final crit:
- You could play with flipping the hierarchy so that the donor is the large focus and the candidate is the subscript.
- Talk about why you think you had trouble finding data pre-2000.
- You could flip the idea and make footnotes on the donor websites to show who they give money to, like Google who doesn’t shout it from the mountain tops.
- You could easily make these into real pins for future elections and hand them out to engage in real activism.
- You can now recategorize these again.
I intentionally designed them with variety so that the financials were denoted quite small in some and on par with the candidate in others to test how it felt to receive the information. I think the variety keeps it interesting.
I believe the reason why finding data on the candidates’ specific donors before 2000 is difficult is because the digitization of records has allowed sites like Open Secrets to easily track this information opposed to looking at paper copies. Additionally, rules and laws regarding campaign donations have changed over time on what needs to be reported and recorded. Also, there wasn’t as much money at stake previously (chart below) so it might not have been as high of a priority and felt like it didn’t need to be tracked and recorded heavily.
I reconfigure them with information that was invisible and changed the meaning of the buttons to now make that information visible. I recontextualized information that you can find if you look- so in a way I’m not sure what putting these in a certain new order would add to the better understanding of the political system. I could put them in scale to show who has had the most money but in the end I’m not sure that’s relevant with inflation and times changing plus then it could be hard to read the smaller candidates. I think it’s worth speaking about the change in the massive amount of money flooding in but I’m not sure that making the smaller ones illegible at scale would make the message clearer. But I will keep thinking on a way to make that work.