Happy New Years, everyone! As a way to start off the year, I thought that it would be interesting to write about something that has evolved a lot over the past year: the Republican field of presidential candidates.

At Penn, I've been working on Snapstream Searcher, which searches through closed captioning television scripts. I've decided to see how often a candidate is mentioned on TV has changed over the year. Check out the chart and do your own analysis here.

As you can see in the title picture, Donald Trump has surged in popularity since he announced his candidicy in June. In general every candidate, experiences a surge in mentions upon announcing his or her candidacy. Usually the surge is not sustained, though.

Many candidates lost popularity over the course of 2015. Jeb Bush lost quite a bit of ground, but perhaps no one has suffered as much as Chris Christie.

Other candidates like Ben Carson are passing fads with a bump from Octorber to November before fading away:

Some cool features I added are the ability to zoom. The D3 brush calculates the coordinates, and then, I update the scales and axes. The overflow is hidden with SVG clipping. To illustrate the usefulness of this feature, we can focus in on the September debate. Here, we see Carly Fiorina's bump in popularity due to her strong debate performance.

Another cool feature that I added was the ability to see actual data points. If one holds the Control key and hovers over the point, we can see a tooltip.

Play around with it here, and let me know what you think!