Research material: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress

I have begun a project to map the impact of American revolutionaries to the various Congresses based on a metric inspired by Erdös Number, or Bacon Number to the more pop-culture inclined. My hypothesis is that there could be value in visualizing how far any given Congress is from the folks that actually founded the country.

This project began as a late night tweet on July the 4th, 2017. I was thinking out the differences in revolution, founding, and actual governing.

I wonder what year Congress dropped to Founding Member number 1? Dropped to 2?#sixDegreesOfRevolutionaries #baconnumber #erdosnumber

— M Molyett &YA1 (@SecsAndCyber) 8:29 PM - 4 Jul 2017

Wanting to find some existing research and maybe leads, I reached out to Twitter and was given some good hints into starting points for mapping connections: Eigenvector centrality. Turns out `* Number` mapping of a population is a form of Centrality analysis. Since my recent academic background is Cybersecurity and my undergrad was a decade ago, it was very helpful to get nudged into the proper academic terminology.

Anyone familiar with US history? Thinking about trying to quantify the impact of revolutionaries in US governance via Bacon number distance

— M Molyett &YA1 (@SecsAndCyber) 7:34 PM - 5 Jul 2017

I am currently in the data gathering stage. I need to compile, locally and in a useful format, all of the people to consider, with a focus on determining who all will be considered Founder Number 0. This has so far meant collecting the names on the signers of the Declaration of Independence and today I was starting on enumerating the delegates to the Continental Congress. Turns out the US Government has already collected that data into a book:

BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY

OF THE

UNITED STATES CONGRESS

1774-2005

THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS

SEPTEMBER 5,1774, TO OCTOBER 21,1788

and

THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES

FROM THE FIRST THROUGH THE ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESSES

MARCH 4,1789, TO JANUARY 3,2005, INCLUSIVE

Now, with that 2000+ page pdf in hand, I have the task of ingesting all that poorly formatted data.