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 newspaper.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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