Author Archives: Luis Natera

Visualizing newspapers words

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For this assignment I worked in a project that evolved and get included in a larger one. I’m currently participating with my hometown university (ITESO) trying to understand what the newspapers are publishing related to political candidates, with elections for mayors and local congress in 60 days the team in Mexico is collecting the news related to the campaign every day.

With the news as a data set I processed it in Wordij a tool to generate semantic networks from .txt files, the software also gets a count of words in a csv file, this files where processed in Excel and then visualized in Tableau, with all the data we could run queries to know how many times a candidate has been mentioned by each newspaper, and adding data every day we are getting a larger picture of whom the newspapers are talking about.

Screenshot 2015-04-07 22.49.09

As part of another project that I’m involved with to monitor the political campaigns, we decided to include the data-viz tool as part of the site, all the info is in spanish but if any one wants to try the tool you could use the right side panel, adjusting dates, frequency of words or search for specific words, for example search for “PRI” or “PAN” or “MC” political parties or for “Villanueva”, “Alfaro” or “Petersen” last name of the candidates. The visualization is here.

Visualization showing queries for "Alfaro", "Villanueva" and "Petersen"

Visualization showing queries for “Alfaro”, “Villanueva” and “Petersen”

Timeline for the firing of Aristegui

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For this assignment I worked on the article of the New York Times about the Carmen Aristegui dismissal “In Mexico, Firing of Carmen Aristegui Highlights Rising Pressures on News Media”

The way I did it was creating a timeline of the latest events in Mexico that could be involved in the story. One of the main believes is that it was the result of some of the investigative journalism that se has been doing as well as her criticism to the Federal Administration, but there isn’t any evidence about that.

Here’s the time line and the link to it:

Screenshot 2015-03-31 18.02.47

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Cars vs Public transport

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For this assignment I chose to focus on a subject that has been controversial in my city (Guadalajara, Mexico), the public debate between invest in public transport and non motorised mobility vs invest in pro-automobile infrastructure.

One of the main argument that has been used from the pro-automobile side is that the government has to build new roads, tunnels and bridges to improve the mobility in the city, on the other hand the evidence shows that building more roads to solve the urban mobility is like trying to solve obesity with larger pants. It does not solve the real problem.

The approach to the debate was in a form of an infographic, trying to show the facts in a more friendly way.

Clic to see the infographic:

Screenshot 2015-03-10 14.51.07

Mexican food review

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The Mexican fast food is closely related to the street, the food vendors are part of the landscape in most of the Mexican towns and cities, their smells and flavours constitute a landscape beyond the visual.

On the other hand the food truck presence has been becoming something more usual -not just in USA, also in Mexico- the food trucks are a good option to get something fast for lunch, I’ll say they are the equivalent to the Mexican street vendors.

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IMG_0004The Jose’s food truck (Located in 20 Carleton St. near Kendall Sq.) combines Mexican classics like tacos with Tex-Mex food like hard shell tacos or bowls. For this occasion I decided to take the tacos, this plate so simple but so delicious and wider in options. I asked for a Beef taco, Chorizo Taco and Carnitas.

The tortillas options for the tacos are hard or soft tortilla, I got the soft corn tortilla -classical one-, but without many expectations because it’s so difficult to find a good tortilla outside Mexico (fortunately this was the exception, they were very good!).

The beef taco was the less fortunate, the beef was good but it wasn’t something spectacular , it was just a beef. On the other hand the Chorizo and Carnitas they were great! The chorizo has a really nice consistency and a adobe flavour really good. But the one that was like being eating in Mexico was the Carnitas Taco, the meat was really good, cooked at the right point not over cooked and with the corn tortillas it was the perfect combination.

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The tacos were served with red rice and fried beans, two classical Mexican sides they were good, nothing spectacular, but a good side for the tacos. The total price for the food was $10 something reasonable for three tacos outside Mexico (In Mexico it would be between $2 to $5 for the three tacos).

4 Hours Challenge:

Order tacos: 12:30 PM

Eat: 36 min.

Writing: 100 min.

Publish: 2:46 PM