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Michelle Minkoff

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“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.” Those were the words of Walt Whitman in Song of Myself, but the mantra is no less true in 2010 than it was in the mid-1800s. It’s part of our mission here at PBS News Navigator: Give the public as much information as possible, allowing folks to make their own decisions by diving deep into contextualized information. Ideally, we're not obscuring, but rather enhancing, directing, and guiding.

One great way to get “just the facts” is through datasets - numbers or pieces of text that are structured and organized. Sometimes it's a typical Excel spreadsheet, but often it's much bigger, so we keep it in a database. And let’s face it, public data and public media go hand-in-hand. They both belong to the…public (yeah, shocking answer.)

You have a right to access this information from the government. We have access to more raw data now than ever before, and the stories data tells bring insight to what’s going in your state, on your street, at your local agency. And there’s some pretty fun ways we can display that information through maps, lists, time lapse videos, etc. We’ll be exploring.

Trouble is, the field of data (which is a combination of the traditional computer-assisted reporting used for data analysis and the field of data visualization, which has applications across many fields) requires an immense amount of skills and time. That's why I'm focused on just that -- with two strong content goals.

1. Interactivity – Static infographics are valuable, but to drill down to the record that’s most relevant, you should be able to manipulate and view data multiple ways.

2. Interesting – Most important of all, placing data up on a site without a narrative or context, well that’s just adding to the unstructured information overload we’ve got to consume. And isn’t that pile of unorganized stuff already overwhelming? That’s part of why we’re trying to add some News Navigation to the media diet conversation.

We’re thinking these tools should be available for content creators of multiple skill levels. So, let’s say I have an interactive map that anyone can plug data into. (Sneak peak: This is the first project we’re churning on. It will allow you to browse data specifically relevant to your state across time. It makes modified and heavily adapted use of the JavaScript library Raphael.js that’s flexible enough to work across browsers and on mobile devices.

We would use this on NewsNav ourselves, and then try to make it useful to anyone who wants it. We’d anticipate releasing each step as it’s ready – a process referred to as agile in the programming world.

Step 1: Just put the main framework code up as is, minus our data, in a central public repository, under a GPL license. Other developers could modify and play with it. We'll heavily comment it to explain the code we post -- which should help in making sure what makes sense to my insane brain meshes with yours. When your developer finds a smarter way to do something, they can push it back up. We all benefit.

Step 2: The piece is embeddable as is, and we give you a chunk of code to use. Copy and paste into your site.

Step 3: Create a web form you can go to and select various options, and insert your own data. This could yield a customized embed code, or a downloadable template.

Step 4: Pre-load some locally relevant data sets into Step 3, so you could choose what you were looking for, again get that customized embed code, and load it onto your site.

Does this sound interesting? Too geeky/not geeky enough? What would you add/subtract? As a user, what kind of interactive data-driven stories would you like to see? Let’s brainstorm together, so we can apply Whitman's adage and get more insight first-hand!