ScraperWiki Screencasts

ScraperWiki has had a little facelift of late so I’ve done a couple of screencasts (one more to come). Enjoy!

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 [...]

Special Treatment for Special Advisers in No. 10

The road to No.10 is paved with advisers, they lead you in, they open doors. Often for themselves. Previous advisers include Alastair Campbell, Ed Balls and the Miliband brothers. Until they’re in the door they generally don’t command the political spotlight. That is, unless they’re on the way out like Andy Coulson. What they do [...]

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 [...]