heisel.org

Urban renewal for data ghettos

Tuesday | January 22, 2008 | 8:18 pm  

So, I gather that in news­rooms it’s become fash­ion­able to put public records online.

I totally love the term that Matt Waite coined — call­ing them data ghet­tos:

But if you take a step into one of the data­bases and you get to my second prob­lem with them: couple of search boxes and a button.

Is that really it? Is that the big news​pa​per.com push into data? Sprawl­ing, barely orga­nized pages to get to a couple of search boxes and a button?

I’ve cer­tainly been guilty of this myself.

But I love the solu­tion that my team came up with at work for a Geor­gia names project that went live tonight.

They pro­vided both a search­able inter­face and some pre-​set searches that high­light inter­est­ing names.

The best part is that Zellyn made it so that jour­nal­ists, devel­op­ers, design­ers, or anyone in our group can create new lists on the fly in our neat-o keen Django application.

It’s the first time at work that we’ve built a tool around a set of data. Nor­mally we lump our work into two camps:

• Data-​driven appli­ca­tions like my pur­chase card project expect that the only human inter­ac­tion is our loyal read­ers con­trasted with…
• Tools like our gallery pub­lish­ing system expect staff users on the ‘backend’ and loyal read­ers to inter­act with them on the ‘front’ end

This the first time that we’ve merged aspects of both and I think it pro­vides some urban renewal to what could oth­er­wise be a data ghetto.

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