Enlarge graphic by: Wordle.net

Our new transcripts of House and Senate floor proceedings, which we're planning to continue all session, give everyone the ability to search what elected officials say — but also to visualize their words.

Enlarge graphic by: Wordle.net

House and Senate bills filed from 11/8-1/4.

A new word cloud visualizes the bills filed so far according to their Texas Legislative Council assigned categories. After education, which accounts for more than a quarter of the bills, the top categories are elections, criminal procedure, vehicles and traffic, and taxation. 

Enlarge graphic by: Matt Stiles

A few days ago, we noted the geographic similarities in the statewide performance of Democrats Bill White and Barack Obama in their respective (and losing) Texas campaigns. The same patterns held true in Harris County, where the former Houston mayor narrowly defeated incumbent Gov. Rick Perry, according to precinct-by-precinct maps.

View county-by-county thematic maps visualizing the partisan breakdown and turnout in the 2010 governor's race. 

Gov. Rick Perry's new book, Fed Up!, has 56,000 words, but "federal," "government," "people," "Washington" and "states" are the most commonly used. 

Texas is — at least geographically — more red after Tuesday's GOP wave.

A new rule that took effect this summer allows — for the first time — real categorization of campaign spending. 

Since you probably don’t have time to look through 70-some campaign ad transcripts, we converted them into word clouds to help visualize the rhetoric of each political party. The word clouds compare the 100 most-used words by Republicans to the 100 most-used words by Democrats. The font size of each word is relative to its frequency of use.

A representative for the Texas Legislative Council, which helps lawmakers research and draft bills, won't speculate on why proposed and passed legislation has risen sharply in the last two decades. But it's one reason the agency has expanded its legal division over the years, she says.

Using data compiled by the Austin American-Statesman, we've produced county-by-county maps visualizing Texas Lottery sales by game type. A higher percentage of lottery revenue in Hill County counties, for example, came from Lotto sales in 2009. Many counties in West Texas, however, appear to prefer instant scratch-off tickets.

Earlier this week, the Austin American-Statesman published an interesting series about the Texas Lottery. We mapped the data, which the paper's editors graciously released, to visualize fiscal year 2009 sales and residents' income characteristics by zip code.

Texas.gov, the state's clearinghouse for services like driver's license renewals and vehicle registrations, has launched a new page featuring numerous raw government data sets — including a list of foreign companies doing business here.

Rice University's political science chair concludes that the minority party's legislative influence rivals the days in which it controlled the Texas House chamber and the speaker’s chair. 

What do per-capita contribution maps tell us about the Texas governor's race?

Most of the gubernatorial endorsements today by Texas sheriffs — though not all — map to the 2008 presidential election results.