Scrape Up, Mash Up, Fuse Up

So I’m in the US, preparing to roll out events. To make decisions as to where to go I needed to get data. I needed numbers on the type of people we’d like to attend our events. In order to generate good data projects we would need a cohort of guests to attend. We would [...]

Top 10 Things for getting Started in Data Journalism

Although “data journalism” can encompass infographics, interactives, web apps, FOI, databases and a whole host of other numbering, coding, displaying techniques; the road less travelled-by has certain steps, turns and speed bumps. In that sense, here’s a list of things to tick off if you’re interested in going down the data journalism road: Know the [...]

Central Government Salaries – Who gets how much

It’s been a while since I liberated any data and that’s because I’ve been wrestling with a scraper of Government Salaries. I’ve only looked at pay floor for the tables below. This is the minimum pay with ceiling pay being £4,999 more than the floor. Salaries ranged from £35,000 to £235,000. There was the coding [...]

Cabinet Office Spending Data Liberated

Seeing as I like to fly in the face of tradition, I’m going to turn things on it’s head and write a blog post of how I did it before I publish what “it” actually is. That is, I have scraped all the Cabinet Office spending data, cleaned it up and extracted it. But before [...]

Data Journalism: The Story So Far

And here’s what Tim Berner-Lee, founder of the internet, said regarding the subject of data journalism: Journalists need to be data-savvy… [it's] going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it [...]

Small Society

The Cabinet Office, in a move towards greater transparency, are attempting to publish all their data online. This isn’t really news but I don’t think news organizations are looking at this data so I’m scraping it and seeing what it has to offer. So as an exercise I’m scraping the page where ministerial gifts, hospitality, travel and [...]

Data: A Gift that Keeps Giving

As part of my data journey, I’m learning to scrape. And so I’m looking for small pieces of data in the usual forms to work on first. That being said, I decided to scrape a csv file of UK Ministerial Gifts received in Cabinet Office 2009-10. For all you novices out there, csv is a [...]

Ode to a Piece of Code

Here is my first piece of Python code (that isn’t messing about in my command line). Well, it’s the first piece that does something with something on the web. That thing being the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Seeing as his works now come in the html edition, all the words he ever writ is now [...]

State of my Media

This week the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism released its annual State of the Media Report. The findings are based on American media, which is the same species as the UK media but of a different tribe. Nevertheless, I think a lot of the findings ring true for the media sector here. [...]

Open Data Campaigning Camp

Who? This is a fringe event to the E-Campaigning Forum run by Fairsay. Rolf Kleef (Open for Change) and Tim Davies (Practical Participation) are co-ordinating the day in a voluntary capacity, with support from Javier Ruiz (Open Rights Group) What? The Open Data Campaigning Camp will immediately follow the annual E-Campaigning Forum (#ECF11), so will be targeted particularly at campaigners [...]