August 11, 2006, 12:37 PM ET
New at work: Mixed Messages
We launched a pretty cool project at work that I think would be worth mentioning here: Mixed Messages is a database of political campaign ads from across the country. The washingtonpost.com political team has collected and categorized dozens of these ads according to a wide array of criteria, such as the ad's music (patriotic, somber, ominous, upbeat), issues mentioned (the economy, crime, etc.), ad characters (firemen, farmers, blue collar workers, teachers) and common visual cues and cliches (American flags, soldiers, black and white photography, images of Sept. 11). It's fun -- and revealing -- to explore the ads in these various ways.
We've also tagged each ad by year, state, candidate, political party, funding source, tone, narrator gender, language and dissemination (TV, Web, radio).
Jason Manning and our political team compiled the data, Alyson Hurt did the design and I did the programming (using Python/Django). Let me know if you have any ideas for improving the site.
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