LA NACION decided to position a new section DATA in its main navigation bar at the home page of lanacion.com

LNData is a place where people in Argentina can find stories with open data and data journalism ingredients. It also includes Access to Information blog posts and article.  Some are datasets extracted from public or government sites, most of which are built, transformed, normalized and/or manually typed by LNdata team.

The data section includes: a data homepage, on open data catalog, a data blog, featured data journalism projects, dataviz, @LNdata Twitter, Facebook Page  and daily reporting with data articles. 

The Data Homepage is integrated to the general structure of lanacion.com website. It consists of 3 main parts that were built in HTML5, CSS3, jquery and ajax.

The data channel (1), in the main navigation bar, leads to a landing page divided in different sections.

A great header with dinamic content that includes:

(2) Blog section: updates immediately via jquery, highlightning the last 3 posts published. It also has an RSS icon plus a “See All Posts” (“Ver todos”) access that links to the blog homepage.

(3) Highlights: In this 3 slide area we choose different data projects to highlight. It updates manually, whenever we want to.

(4) Vozdata:  a collaborative tool for transforming public documents trapped in PDFs into a real time database that all citizens can understand and journalists can report from. 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. When project is finished the data is share in open formats (CSV, XML, Json).

Then site divides in 2 columns.

Left one includes all data journalism and open data articles via

(5) Articles aggregator: articles tagged in newsroom with “Nacion Data” acummulate here in a daily basis. Articles appearing in this feed include one or some of the following elements:

• – open data in machine readable format (based in Junar platform and/or Google Spreadsheets)
• – dataviz (tables or graphics, usually in Tableau Public),
• – news application,
• – embedded original documentation (via DocumentCloud or Scribd),
• – information gathered (or denied!) via access to information requests,
• – information gathered using technology that could not be replaced by human process or analysis (usually scraping, conclusions over combination and filtering of databases, etc.)

Right column contains different sections:

(6) Open Data Catalog: this section refers to our open data catalog containing + 150 datasets, hosted in Junar open data platform.

The open data catalog widget has 2 different tabs. One for the “Latest” (“Ultimos”) datasets list, the other to accesed the “Most Viewed” (“Más vistos”) datasets list. Finally, it also has an access to the whole catalog “See all” (“Ver Todos”) where we host more than 40 datasets divided in different topic tabs.

The open data catalog allows download of datasets in formats like xls, csv, json.

It also has an API for the whole package.

Scrolling down the page, the right column also includes:

(7)  Wealth Statements: this area direct to a news application that hosts the wealth statements of 24 main public servants, including Argentina’s President, VicePresident and many Ministries and Secretaries Officers from the Government’s Executive Branch. The app allows comparing asset declarations between 2003 and 2011.

Originals declarations are uploaded to DocumentCloud and, inside the application, they are accesible from each public servant personal profile.

(8) Censo 2001-2010.

(9) Transport Subsidies: this area directs to our first microsite that gathers a news application for navigating subsidies in bus transportation, an aggregated channel of articles tagged as Bus Subsidies (“Subsidios a colectivos”) and some tutorials and video.

(10) Direct Access to Data Journalism Handbook translation (funded and published by LA NACION)

(11) Dataviz Selection: this area direct to an acumulation of articles tagged in newsroom as “dataviz” to help users find articles with visualizations highlighted by our multimedia team.

(12) Twitter Account Widget: the widget streams tweets originated in our @LNdata account that focuses on sharing tweets and work by our referents around the world and, of course, our own data opening and journalism.

(13) Facebook Page: direct access to fan our page that publishes content related to our data production but also shares, in our own wall, information published by different data and transparency Facebook Pages that we are fan of (english and spanish).

(14) Mail Contact

(15) Video Player: contains Youtube video which is the latest piece uploaded of a selected Playlist of our own Channel. It algo gives direct access to our 100+ units of original multimedia content (most of it are interviews) via “See All” link (“Ver todos”).

At the end we included a banner for International Center for Journalists because during the creation process we got feedback from fellow Sandra Crucianelli.