Senate Hearings Analysis

Project Overview

What topics dominate U.S. Senate hearings, and how do they shift in response to real-world events? This project analyzes over 1,000 Senate hearing transcripts from 2023-2025 (sessions 118-119), extracting and tracking keywords to reveal which issues receive the most legislative attention, how topics cluster together, and how discussion priorities evolve over time.

We built a complete data pipeline—from web scraping and text cleaning to keyword extraction and interactive visualization—packaged as a reusable Python tool for analyzing congressional hearing data.

Project by: Mikkel Christensen and Corbin Brinkerhoff

Dataset: Senate hearings from sessions 118-119 (~2023-2025) scraped from govinfo.gov

Navigation

New to the project? Start here:

• Technical Report - Read our findings: dominant topics, temporal patterns, keyword correlations, and what they reveal about Senate priorities
• Interactive Dashboard - Explore the data yourself with our Streamlit app featuring keyword search, trend charts, and correlation heatmaps

Want to reproduce or extend our work?

• Tutorial - Step-by-step walkthrough of our data collection, cleaning, and keyword extraction process
• Documentation - Complete API reference for all functions in the senate_hearings package
• Pypi Package - Our packages page on pypi.org

Source code: GitHub Repository