BUZZWORD_TICKER

What one unit means. One point = one Congressional Record document (a floor speech, an extension of remarks, a daily digest entry) published that year that contains the term at least once. A senator saying "China" forty times in one speech counts once. This undercounts enthusiasm and overcounts nothing, which is the correct direction to be wrong in.

Where the data comes from. Counts are pulled from the GovInfo API, the Government Publishing Office's official access point for the Congressional Record (collection CREC). The pipeline script queries each term for each calendar year and writes the totals to data.js. Anyone can re-run it and get the same numbers.

Query terms. Twenty symbols at launch. Most map to one exact phrase; a few need variants to be fair: $AI = "artificial intelligence" (the bare string "AI" matches too much noise), $CRYPTO = "cryptocurrency" or "crypto", $UAP = "UFO" plus both "unidentified aerial phenomena" and "unidentified anomalous phenomena", $COVID includes "coronavirus", $NFT includes "non-fungible token". The full mapping lives in fetch_counts.py, one line per symbol.

Fine print. The Congressional Record is what members say on the floor plus what they insert into it, so this measures political attention, not legislation. The current year is partial and marked YTD.

Not investment advice. Words are not securities. Congress cannot be shorted, which many people consider a design flaw.

Source. U.S. Government Publishing Office, govinfo.gov, Congressional Record (CREC). Public domain.