| Type: | Package |
| Title: | Fetch United States Congressional Records (1995-Present) |
| Version: | 1.0.0 |
| Author: | Steph Buongiorno [aut, cre] |
| Maintainer: | Steph Buongiorno <steph.buon@proton.me> |
| Description: | Fetch United States Congressional Records from their API https://api.govinfo.gov/docs/ such as congressional speeches, speaker names, and metadata about congressional sessions, and detailed granule records. Optional parameters allow users to specify congressional sessions, and the maximum number of speeches to retrieve. Data is parsed, cleaned, and returned in a structured dataframe for analysis. |
| License: | GPL-3 |
| Encoding: | UTF-8 |
| RoxygenNote: | 7.3.2 |
| Imports: | httr, dplyr, stringr, rvest, tibble |
| Suggests: | testthat, knitr, rmarkdown |
| NeedsCompilation: | no |
| Packaged: | 2025-05-08 17:55:50 UTC; steph |
| Repository: | CRAN |
| Date/Publication: | 2025-05-12 08:30:02 UTC |
Retrieve and Process Congressional Record Speeches
Description
Queries the Congressional Record collection for a given session and date range, retrieves speech text and associated metadata from granules, and processes the information into a structured tibble. Supports limiting the number of speeches collected.
Usage
get_congressional_records(
API_KEY,
max_results = NULL,
date_from = NULL,
date_to = NULL,
congress_session = 117
)
Arguments
API_KEY |
Character string. Your API key for accessing the govinfo API. |
max_results |
Integer (optional). Maximum number of speeches to retrieve. If 'NULL', retrieves all available speeches. |
date_from |
Character string (optional). Start date (YYYY-MM-DD) for filtering records. If 'NULL', determined by session. |
date_to |
Character string (optional). End date (YYYY-MM-DD) for filtering records. If 'NULL', determined by session. |
congress_session |
Integer. Congressional session number (default is 117). |
Value
A tibble where each row corresponds to an extracted speech, including columns for URL, date, title, speaker, and speech text.
Examples
if (nzchar(Sys.getenv("GOVINFO_API_KEY"))) {
# Retrieve your govinfo API key from environment
api_key <- Sys.getenv("GOVINFO_API_KEY")
# Retrieve Congressional Record speeches from the 117th Congress (2021-2023)
speeches <- get_congressional_records(
API_KEY = api_key,
max_results = 5,
congress_session = 117
)
head(speeches)
}