Data press is a WordPress plugin for exploring data. It allows ‘faceted browsing’ of a dataset. It can read data from specially formatted Google Spreadsheets.
We changed in the headings in the Google Spreadsheet generated by Scraper Wiki to datapress format and followed the instructions here to create the ‘Exhibit’ display below.
To allow us to use a ‘tag’ facet we created an extra column in our Google Spreadsheet and used the rather lengthy formula:
=LOWER(SUBSTITUTE( SUBSTITUTE( SUBSTITUTE( SUBSTITUTE( SUBSTITUTE(E192,” ”,”;”),”.”,”"),”(“,”"),”)”,”"),”‘”,”"))
in order to turn the descriptions into a series of lowercase words without punctuation separated by ‘;’ to that datapress would treat them as key-word tags.
Click the Exhibit to load it full-screen and explore the data.
Exhibit is only really designed to handle datasets of up to 500 or so items as it all runs in your web browser, so our dataset of over 3000 items places a strain on it. However, similar server-based interfaces can easily be created.