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Diff or Chop? Github, CSV data files and OpenRefine 27 Aug 2013 | 02:49 pm
A recent post on the OKFNLabs blog – Diffing and patching tabular data – proposes a visualisation scheme (and some associated tooling) for comparing the differences between two tabular data/CSV files:...
Nudging Up the Price of Parking 24 Aug 2013 | 02:05 am
When faced with a car parking charge of £1.90 and a “no change” ticket machine, how much do we actually end up paying? A recent report on English Local Authority Parking Finances by the RAC Foundatio...
Negative Payments in Local Spending Data 18 Aug 2013 | 04:08 am
In anticipation of a new R library from School of Data data diva @mihi_tr that will wrap the OpenSpending API and providing access to OpenSpending.org data directly from within R, I thought I’d start ...
Some Sketchnotes on a Few of My Concerns About #opendata 14 Aug 2013 | 02:56 pm
With my growing unease about just what the agenda driving open government/public data is, I think I’m going to have to find some time away to walk the dog lots, and mull over what pieces might be part...
Rambling Round-Up of Some Recent #OpenData Notices 13 Aug 2013 | 04:38 pm
It’s been some time since I (b)logged recent reports and announcements relating to the ongoing evolution of the open data thang in the UK, so here’s a quick round-up of some of the things I have float...
Disclosing More Information Than You Intended 7 Aug 2013 | 04:31 am
Whenever I make a data related FOI request or a request for data within my own organisation, I try to ask for copies of the data as data in the form of a spreadsheet, CSV file or database dump. One ad...
Using OpenRefine to Clean Multiple Documents in the Same Way 26 Jul 2013 | 03:57 pm
When working with data that is published on a monthly basis according to the same template, it is often the case that we need to apply the same data cleaning rules to the data each time a new file is ...
Generating Sankey Diagrams from rCharts 23 Jul 2013 | 04:34 pm
A couple of weeks or so ago, I picked up an inlink from an OCLC blog post about Visualizing Network Flows: Library Inter-lending. The post made use of Sankey diagrams to represent borrowing flows, and...
Wrangling Data With “Free” Tools – LASI13 Workshop Round-Up 4 Jul 2013 | 12:32 am
I’m fortunate enough to be visiting the LASI13, the Learning Analytics Summer Institute, in Stanford this week, and got to lead a workshop session yesterday on tools for tinkering and playing with dat...
Generating Alerts From Guardian University Tables Data 23 Jun 2013 | 05:24 pm
One of the things I’ve been pondering with respect to the whole data journalism process is how journalists without a lot of statistical training can quickly get a feel for whether there may be interes...
