Get Started With Scraping – Extracting Simple Tables from PDF Documents
As anyone who has tried working with “real world” data releases will know, sometimes the only place you can find a particular dataset is as a table locked up in…
Several Takes on Defining Data Journalism
Every so often I get asked the question: “so what is data journalism?” I’m still not sure I have a very good definition of it, but here are three different…
Analysing UK Lobbying Data Using OpenRefine
Being able to spot when we might might be able to turn documents into datasets is a useful skill for any data journalist or watchdog to develop, In this (rather…
Asking Questions of Data – Garment Factories Data Expedition
As preparation for the upcoming data expedition on Mapping the garment factories this weekend, several intrepid explorers have been collating data from brand supplier lists that identify the location of…
When A Government Minister’s Data Laundry is Hung Out to Dry…
A well targeted Freedom of Information request to the UK Department for Education and its consequent report hit the news here recently. It turns out that a claim by Minister…
Asking Questions of Data – Some Simple One-Liners
One of the great advantages of having a dataset available as data is that we can interrogate it in very direct way. In this post, we’ll see a variety of…
Hunting for Data – Learning How to Read and Write Web Addresses, aka URLs
In every data explorer’s toolbox, there is likely to be a range of tools and techniques that have proven their worth again and again. For discovering data on the web,…
A Quick Peek at Some Charities Data…
As part of the Maximising Your Data Impact launch event of the Civil Society Data Network (reviewed in part by the Guardian here: Open data and the charity sector: a perfect fit), a series of mini-data expeditions provided participants with the opportunity to explore a range of data related questions relevant to the third sector. [...]
On the Relative Truthiness of Data
One of the more common requests for activities around the use of data are for sessions or workshops on generating charts and data visualisations. Visual techniques can be used to…
First Steps in Identifying Climate Change Denial Networks On Twitter
A week or two ago, a Guardian article declared the Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks. The article described how two grant making trusts were being…