Sorting

The key to wielding data as a tool in the modern age is the ability to collect disparate points and shape them into a coherent and compelling narrative. Often, presentations and research that heavily rely on corralling large amounts of data focus heavily on visualization tools for representing facts in digestible bites. Key to visualization is sorting. Sorting orders randomness into a human-readable format. Sorting takes a pile of books and puts them in alphabetical order. Sorting takes figures and numbers and allows us to compare them by their attributes. Sorting, at its core, expresses the result of the dominance of the human mind over the unpredictability of the world. As we stand on the shoulders of giants, we humbly implement a feature that allows us to provide our representative, party, and district data to the user in an order that, to use a miraculous term, "makes sense."

Problems

An issue of our previous method of displaying data is that no matter how relevant the data was as a whole, a seemingly random ordering of the results did not make that relevancy clear. How can one compare Arizona's third congressional district to New York's fifth? How is Democratic representative Ami Bera similar to Republican representative Justin Amash? The act of sorting takes relevant data and allows it to tell a story. Filtering the Representatives model by a certain range of last names would return the correct information, but would order the results in a way that did not make it clear whether or not the filter worked properly at first glance. Sorting makes the data accessible and usable.

Solution

Our solution was to provide multiple ways to sort each of our models in a way that is relevant to that specific model. For example, since they are people, it makes sense to be able to order Representatives by their names. This ends up being much more convenient to the user as a specific filtered set of data could be easily identified with a simple glance, without having to scroll through the results to make sure. This is done through the same way we implement filtering in the backend. By submitting a filter query with the sort specified, it allows us to not only sort through unfiltered results but also for that sort to persist through any filters the user wishes to select. Another advantage of this is that this can be part of our RESTful API, which provides another method for users to retrieve the sorted data.