Mapping with CartoDB and Torque

Publicado el 01.06.15 por admin

Using resources as CartoDb together with data analysis allowed us to develop original content presented as interactive maps. We spent together four full day self-learning sessions mixing together a multidisciplinary team including designers, journalists and the data team.

One of the first examples was a map with the areas that have free wi-fi in Buenos Aires, published in January and updated and published again in March and May, in related articles.

January: a map allows us to know the areas of free wi-fi access in the City of Buenos Aires in libraries, museums and public squares. Seguir leyendo →

Twitter Reverb

Publicado el 27.05.15 por admin

We played with Twitter Data for different reporting situations to help highlight the way a story explodes on Twitter. Something non-coders can use to interrogate an API and create a visual, Twitter Reverb.

The spinning circle in the middle represents the numbers of retweets and the major influencers. Context for individual retweets are shown as smaller circles.

Clicking on the circles at the bottom would take you through to the tweets themselves.

Some examples: Seguir leyendo →

LA NACION DATA: Open Data Journalism for Change

Publicado el 20.05.15 por admin

LA NACION continued in 2014-2015 with its effort to use data as new raw material for journalism and to contribute to open data in Argentina while reporting or as a way to activate demand of more public information, in a country still without a FOI Law.

After another year of training and consistency in the data project of LA NACION, opportunities of new projects appeared. We continued reporting from datasets built from scratch and then transformed, opened and shared by our team in print, online and social media.

Seguir leyendo →

Vozdata II: crowdsourcing online collaborative platform for investigative reporting

Publicado el 20.05.15 por admin

VozData is a collaborative tool to convert public documents trapped in closed formats into a structured database. Information proccessed is suitable for general audience understanding and for journalists to analyse and report. The application was inspired by The Guardian “MP´s Expenses” and Propublica´s “Free the files”.

VozData´s first initiative was Senate Expenses (Argentina), divided in 3 different periods. Over the course of a couple of months, LA NACION digitized more than 10000 PDF. Team work was fulfilled by 1000 volunteers. Data obtained was published online in real time in the form of rankings of recipients and type of expense. The platform also includes ranking of users that review and classify documents.

At the end of each data project, LA NACION´s data team reviewed representative samples and published the dataset in open data formats for download (CSV, XLS, etc). The Code driving Vozdata was open sourced by OpenNews Fellows and named Crowdata.

Aggregated LA NACION’s reporting on Senate Expenses, including findings in Vozdata projects.

Vozdata VIDEO Demo in english

CIVIC OPEN COLLABORATION: Partnering with NGO’s and Universities, and general audience!

Students of Universidad Torcuato di Tella – Masters in Journalism during a civic marathon al LA NACION

During May 2014 we started a campaign to try to finish “the stack of PDFs” of the first set of Senate Expenses during #SemanadeMayo that is a patriotic week and culminates May 25th. This historical day of 1810 is well known with a phrase “El Pueblo Quiere Saber” “People wants to know”. So we decided to organize what we named “Civic Marathons” for opening data using Vozdata.

We made banners for social media and got shared via LA NACION & LNdata twitter and Facebook accounts. Seguir leyendo →

VozData: collaborating to free data from PDFs – The Senate Expenses part II

Publicado el 30.05.14 por Momi Peralta Ramos

VozData screenshot

1. Introduction

VozData is a collaborative tool for converting public documents trapped in PDFs into a structured database that all citizens can understand and journalists can report from.

The application is inspired in “Free the files” by Propublica.org and “MP´s Expenses” by The Guardian; it allows readers and users to be part of the process of checking documentation that is vital for citizen participation and control of information produced by governments.

The first project of this initiative focused on expenses by the National Senate and included 6500 renditions of accounts issued by the General Accounting Office (Dirección General de Contaduría) of that chamber for the years 2010, 2011, and 2012, published on the official site of the institution.

Senate Expenses is a project that continues the investigation of the same name, winner of the 2013 DJA (See more here). LA NACION had a great number of public documents in PDF format that presented enormous difficulties for processing, and even applying six different OCR engines, valuable information is still being lost.

But the value and the amount of stories and even judicial investigations that were discovered by this project lead us to open and put it now in the hands of our audience, so they could detect more stories. We collected this stories in an integrated TAG of our CMS in Lanacion.com Seguir leyendo →

CartoDB for Elections Mapping

Publicado el 26.05.14 por Momi Peralta Ramos

The LNData team with Manuel Aristarán, Mozilla OpenNews fellow 2013, developed an interactive map that allowed visualization of the results of the 2013 parliamentary election in the different voting centers of CABA and Buenos Aires province. Also there was access to the details of the telegrams from all tables for more information.

The map in CartoDB combined the geo-localization of voting centers with the number of votes and the distribution of those votes by party in each center. The size of the bubble on the map represented the difference between the winner and the runner-up.

The team did a pilot test for the primaries (known here as PASO) and repeated the experience in the October 27 election.

How the results turned out in the school that you voted?

Seguir leyendo →

Using DevExtreme, HTML5 and Javascript to connect reusable data visualizations with updated data

Publicado el 25.05.14 por Momi Peralta Ramos

Since 2012 Lanacion.com keeps an open data catalog, with updated datasets. Besides, we report stories with open data published in Google Spreadsheets .

Most of these datasets are manually updated and we use Tableau Public to illustrate most of our stories with interactives as we cannot afford to have developers, we have only one.

Since 2013 our dataviz designer learned D3.js and javascript to develop our own visualizations and we detected many reusable ones that could serve as useful context information for many stories.

He selected DeveXtreme: a crossplatform HTML5 / Javascript tool to create responsive web applications for touch enabled devices and traditional desktops.

Examples 1) Dollar: official and “blue” prices of dollar conversion to pesos, daily updated

Example 2) Central Bank stock of dollar reserves (Reservas del Banco Central) , weekly updated

Example 3) Inflation: official and Congress CPI variations: updated monthly

Example 4) Vehicles patented (registered) per month: updated monthly

Example 5) Real estate amount of propertie´s transactions in City of Buenos Aires, updated monthly

Awards 2015

Categoría: Online Technology