Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

the debate decoder

One of the big projects occupying my time over the past few weeks has been the Debate Decoder, an interactive feature combining debate video, transcripts, analysis and inline fact-checking. We also invited user feedback in the form of "who won this question?" polls after each debate question and a discussion forum set up to allow users to comment on all things related to the debate.

The Decoder has a Flash-based video player, and the rest is built in to the page itself, with the styling and page interactions set up with a bit of CSS/JS/JQuery magic. The goal here was to present features in the medium best suited to that feature -- so instead of making a wholly Flash-based transcript player, we left the transcript in HTML, where it might be resized, read by screenreaders or scanned for keywords by search engines. That set-up also made it pretty easy to insert inline fact-checking annotations. These annotations were added within the flow of the transcript itself, immediately after the quote they address. A little bit of CSS took care of pushing them over to the right margin as a kind of sidenote.

Production-wise, it took about six hours to put together each Decoder, from debate's start to final publish. (This doesn't include the time it took to do the initial design / build.) I'm a big fan of these sort of quick turnaround projects, where several people pitch in all at once to produce a final product at the end of the night. It's a focused, collaborative effort that sparks my creative energy; even at that late hour, it's kind of fun. (I wouldn't want to be on 2 a.m. duty all the time, but in focused bursts, projects like these are a nice change of pace.)