Visualizing Textual Data: Members of Congress and their affiliations

Question

I am having a hard time getting started with some way to visualize some data consisting largely of congressional members and their political affiliations. As such it is mostly text data and doesn't lend itself immediately to something like ManyEyes, Google Charts etc.

More to the point, I have spreadsheets of data on senators and representatives including their stance on a few relevant legislations and more importantly their membership in certain committees and caucuses.

As a spreadsheet, this data is not very informative, I am trying to visualize tangible relationships btw members in terms of most active/salient members across various legislative actions (bills, letters of support) and affiliations (again, committees and caucuses) as well as other useful connections or "networks" that aren't immediately apparent in spreadsheet form.

I am at a point where I don't know how to proceed further and was hoping someone could suggest a good start for coming up with a solution.

EDIT 1: I've been drawn to SQLite as a tool for this, but I have no interest in copying word for word the spreadsheets I am trying to input into this database into the terminal.

EDIT 2: If possible this database needs to be accessible to many different people across a number of different organizations, so not looking for something that is OS or software specific.

EDIT 3: Looking at SQLite as a backend, I am interested in a lightweight frontend / database management program that will allow me and others (non-techies) to perform queries that get at defining the value network between entities (congresspeople and the lobbyists that fund them, for example).

Answer 1

Looks like this was a dud of a question.

Using SQLite with the firefox add-on as an editor.

Will report back if anything interesting happens.

Answer 2

I would put the data in MySql or Postgres and create a web frontend to allow yourself and others to view the data. You can save the Excel documents to csv and then it will be much easier to move the data into your db.

Protovis or Flare would be good for creating the association networks you mentioned. A matrix diagram may also be interesting.

Here are some links with various government visualizations that might be interesting to you:

• Lobbyists Networks - similar to what you are talking about
• Design For America contest and entries
• IBM Many Bills