Welcome to the Speeches and Public Statements Sub-Department!
Are you ready for some wiki training? Don't worry, we'll go over most of this during in-person training soon!
<-- Back to the Speeches Guide
Table of Contents
Introduction
On this wiki page, you will find everything you need to get started learning about the Speeches and Public Statements program. First, let's talk about the three traits you need to be successful at Vote Smart.Three Good Traits of a Researcher
The three traits of a good researcher at Vote Smart are Thoroughness, Accuracy, and Speed, in that order. That is, if you can do nothing else, be thorough. If you can do two things, be thorough and accurate. If you're thorough, accurate and fast, that makes you a rockstar - this generally comes with practice.The quality of our data depends on this hierarchy. Practicing being thorough and accurate first will help you to be a valuable member of the team. Speed will inevitably come as you gain more experience. If you attempt to be speedy right off the bat, not only will you be putting bad data into our database, but you won't develop a strong foundation for future growth. Your supervisor will provide you with feedback to help you recognize the errors that you make, and will help you get faster over time by teaching you the techniques the team has developed over a long period of time. Be patient!
Speeches Resources
The sub-department uses various tools to organize speech collection, entry, categorization/tagging, and check the data we want citizens to have access to. Below is a list of tools you need to become familiar with:Vote Smart's Website
Our Website - specifically the public statements sections; it is crucial that you understand how our data is transferred from the original source to our website.The Speeches Wiki
Our Wiki - it contains valuable background information, data standards, staff and intern expectations, and guides for training and management. To start, pay special attention to the processes and policies we have put in place.Admin - Our User-Friendly Portal to the Database
Admin - a user-friendly way to enter and check pieces of data. You will be using this extensively. We will demonstrate how it works during training. Just take a look for now.Speeches Schedules
Speeches Schedules - our schedules contain lists of every official we track, their websites, and a place to keep track of our progress.- All Speeches Schedules are located in Google Documents. If you can't access them through the link, tell your supervisor.
- Username: yourname@votesmart.org
- Password: your password
- Go to the shared section of your google drive - you should have access to the "public statements" folder, of which "regular schedules" is a subfolder.
- On many of our schedules, there is a column labeled "Notes" - this is where notes go for each website. They can be really helpful.
Sources
See some examples of primary sources and a definition of what a primary source is on the Data Standards page.Collecting and Entering Speeches using Admin:
Now that you have checked out all the tools/resources we use to collect and enter speeches, let's get a little bit more specific and check out some of the intricacies of the Speeches and Public Statements sub-department.The Types of Speeches We Collect
We collect multiple types of public statements. Sometimes, politicians give live speeches, such as the State of the Union, but more often, they release a statement, which they did not deliver to a live audience. There are 13 different types of public statements that we take; some are more common than others.Head to the Type of Speeches page to get more familiar with the different ways politicians address the public and one another.
Speeches Field Boxes in Admin
Admin has many "field boxes," which we use to input data. Before you head to the next page, here is a bit of clarifying information on what a field is. You may have already figured this out, but a field box in Admin allows us less tech savvy people to interact with the data. We can take the date of a public statement from a primary source and put it into the date field in admin. After you save, that piece of data is now in our database! Pretty cool, huh?Head to the Speeches Field Boxes in Admin page, and get more familiar with it.
- It is extremely important to be thorough in collecting statements. Do not move on to the next source until you have searched all areas of a source website for new content.
- Familiarity with these sources and a reliable routine will contribute to accuracy, thoroughness, and speed (listed in order of importance) in speech collection.
What Speeches to Take/Not Take
Now that you are pretty familiar with the types of speeches we collect and how we input data into our database, it is a good time to talk a little bit about collection. It is easy to assume we take anything a politician says, and that is largely a good assumption, however, we don't take EVERYTHING for a couple of reasons. Sometimes, politicians talk about procedure or read the Constitution. We don't take those because they don't contain politicians' opinions. Anytime a politician speaks about an issue, we generally take it. Knowing these rules is important because if you are taking everything a politician says, 1) you are going to waste a lot of your time, 2) it would be strange to see a statement on our website that said something like: "I was absent because I was in my home state." Sometimes, that is all a politician says. We don't take stuff like that.Head to the Take/Do Not Take page to get a more detailed explanation of what we take and what we don't.
Helpful Hints/FAQ
You have now delved pretty far into the basics of the Speeches and Public Statements Sub-Department. You may be wondering about a bunch of different things. We have put together a Helpful Hints/FAQ page to try to answer some general questions/provide you a quick source of hints for decreasing errors and increasing speed.Head to the Helpful Hints/FAQ page for some FAQs and some advice on how to become a better speeches researcher.
