More On The New NY Senate Website - Pretty Graphs
Digging in a little further after my initial foray yesterday.
Reader John C said yesterday:
What was the point of taking PDF documents from the MTA web site into HTML? If anything, that just made them less readable, not more. How does a table of the net operating income/deficit of MTA’s sub-agencies help laypeople understand anything they didn’t know already? We need some written text to go along with the tables, to actually explain what’s going on.
I want an “executive summary” as well. I assume they’re getting to that, as they talk about the whole Plain Language initiative as a work in progress. Hey NY Senate: give us an initial paragraph or two to help us as we dive into the data! (Please.)
But to answer another of John C’s questions: what good is data taken from PDF and put into HTML? Why, you can sort it to your heart’s content. Note the clickable headers in the “Net Operating Income” table:
But what’s even better is that they can then port the data into a graph-generating website, called Swivel, where you can get a visual representation of the data. A picture is worth a thousands words and all that:
You can also download the data into a spreadsheet and have fun with numbers. Of course, all this opens up the possibility of anti-government forces taking the data and warping it to their own ends, but to my mind, open government is well worth that risk.
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