Comments on: NFL Draft Databases

By: Jane Smith

Jane Smith — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 14:45:08 +0000

Glad the draft database was useful, our Palm Beach Post readers like it, too.

I put the database together for our website. It took a great deal more time cleaning up the data — getting it in a pdf format, converting to columns, then doing some Excel work to join and unjoin columns. Then, of course, cleaning up the data, such as translating football acronyms into full words and turning all caps into caps and lower case.

By: Derek

Derek — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:45:38 +0000

Aaron: No, I got it from the Palm Beach Post app, and it required a little cleaning (some duplicate college names).

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:59:25 +0000

Where did you get the data? DraftHistory.com?

By: Derek

Derek — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:45:02 +0000

Mark: Agreed - data presentation is tough. There’s not a huge volume of resources out there that I’ve seen, but Wilson Miner (designer of EveryBlock) recently wrote a piece that I like.

Joe: Thanks - there are 1-2 other small fixes I need to make in the next day or so.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:27:19 +0000

This is a great example.

One thing I noticed, search is currently case-sensitive. I instinctively searched “marino”, which returned nothing.

Should be easy to correct by using “icontains” in Django.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:59:25 +0000

As someone who has struggled with this, I appreciate the post.

My own, less elegant sports example, http://datacenter.courier-journal.com/sports/recruiting/search.php, took me much more than 92 minutes using PHP and Dreamweaver.

One problem is that crunching data behind-the-scenes for stories doesn’t necessarily prepare you for making artful presentations on the Web. This is a new thing for a lot of us and it shows.

Not knowing the tools intimately and not having the right tools are also problems. Django’s news pedigree is an obvious benefit — I wish I could use it at our place. There are a lot of frameworks and while they’re easy to find learning to use them well — especially if you work in isolation, without others at hand to guide you — isn’t so easy. Or maybe I’m just as stupid as I sometimes feel.

I’d like to read more on how to skillfully present data on the Web. I haven’t found much in my own searching. Stuff like, when should you use a dropdown and when shouldn’t you? When is it better to browse and when is it better to search or should you always offer both options? How do you lead the uninitiated through a dataset so they don’t just end up feeling lost? As nice looking as that Indy Star passing database is, I couldn’t make it work in Firefox, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I wasn’t using it right or it just wasn’t working. I’ve watched intelligent people in our newsroom become flummoxed when presented with a couple of search fields on a form. I haven’t seen much evidence-based discussion of how to do this well, but maybe I’m not looking in the right places.

Do you or any of your readers have any suggestions? Is there a Tufte of the Web database?