The UK’s BIG Lottery Fund recently released its grant data since 2004 as a set of lovely CSV files: You can get it yourself here or here. I found it a great opportunity to try out some new tricks with Tableau, and have a bit of a poke around another largish dataset from government. The […]
Got a PDF you want to get data from? Try our easy web interface over at PDFTables.com! Why is ScraperWiki so interested in PDF files? Because the world is full of PDF files. The treemap above shows the scale of their dominance. In the treemap the area a segment covers is proportional to the number […]
I bumped into Andy Cotgreave at Strata London a couple of weeks ago. The Tableau booth had a handy place for me to put my coffee whilst I ate my biscuits, and as a regular user of Tableau and twitter I recognised him immediately! Andy is Social Content Manager at Tableau. I was pleased to see […]
Team ScraperWiki has been in London today, at the Strata Conference. A trip organised late in the day after I received word that my Ignite talk had been accepted. For those unfamiliar with the Ignite format, it’s 5 minutes, 20 slides with strictly 15 seconds per slide – a headlong plunge. The event was hosted […]
A while back I reviewed Larry Keller’s book The Tableau 8.0 Training Manual, at the same time I ordered George Peck’s book Tableau 8: the official guide. It’s just arrived. The book comes with a DVD containing bonus videos featuring George Peck’s warm, friendly tones and example workbooks. I must admit to being mildly nonplussed at […]
As software company, use of some sort of software source control system is inevitable, indeed our CEO wrote TortoiseCVS – a file system overlay for the early CVS source control system. For those uninitiated in the joys of software engineering: source control is a system for recording the history of file revisions allowing programmers to […]
Recently Shelter came to us asking for data on house prices across the UK to help them with some research in support of campaign on housing affordability. This is a challenge we’re well suited to address, in fact a large fraction of the ScraperWiki team have scraped property price data for our own purposes. Usually […]
When you think of humanitarian crises like war, famine, earthquakes, storms and the like you probably don’t think “data”. But data is critical to humanitarian relief efforts, background questions like: What is the country we’re deploying to like in terms of population, geography, infrastructure, economic development, social structures? What resources, financial and human, are available […]
Are you excited by data? Are you impatient to download and explore new datasets? If you answered yes, to either of these questions then you might be interested in a new data scientist position which has arisen here at ScraperWiki. Don’t worry if you’ve never described yourself as a data scientist, we’re looking for people […]
As you may have gathered I’m on a journey, I’ve worked as a physicist, a data scientist for 20 years and now I’ve fallen amongst software engineers. There are obvious similarities in what we do, we write code to do stuff. I write code to analyse things and the software engineers write code to do […]
