Hi, I’m Steve and I’m the most recent addition to ScraperWiki’s burgeoning intern ranks. So, how exactly did I end up here? Looking at ScraperWiki’s team page, you can see that scientists working here is a common theme. I’m no different in that regard. Until recently, I was working as a university scientific researcher (looking at new […]
Mastering space and time with jQuery deferreds
Recently Zarino and I were pairing on making improvements to a new scraping tool on ScraperWiki. We were working on some code that allows the person using the tool to pick out parts of some scraped data in order to extract a date into a new database column. For processing the data on the server […]
Book review: The Tableau 8.0 Training Manual – From clutter to clarity by Larry Keller
My unstoppable reading continues, this time I’ve polished off The Tableau 8.0 Training Manual: From Clutter to Clarity by Larry Keller. This post is part review of the book, and part review of Tableau. Tableau is a data visualisation application which grew out of academic research on visualising databases. I’ve used Tableau Public a little bit […]
Making a ScraperWiki view with R
In a recent post I showed how to use the ScraperWiki Twitter Search Tool to capture tweets for analysis. I demonstrated this using a search on the #InspiringWomen hashtag, using Tableau to generate a visualisation. Here I’m going to show a tool made using the R statistical programming language which can be used to view […]
#InspiringWomen – catching twitter with ScraperWiki
Those of you on twitter may have caught the recent #InspiringWomen hash tag, this was a response to the online abuse and threats received by many women in the public eye. On Sunday 4th August people tweeted about women who inspired them marking their tweets with the #InspiringWomen hashtag. #InspiringWomen was launched by my friend, […]
Hello, I’m Ed
Last week, Pete wrote his welcome post announcing he was the new guy. Not strictly true as I am the real new guy! Actually, Pete and I started on the same day and there are two other new starters you will be hearing about soon, so we are both old news! Unlike some of the […]
Adventures in Tableau – loading files
Tableau is a widely used visualisation tool, particularly in the business intelligence area. It grew out of the Polaris project at Stanford University, subtitled “interactive database visualisation”. This is worth bearing in mind since it is the context in which Tableau deals with data. It anticipates that the data you are interested in comes in the form of […]
Exploring Stack Exchange Open Data
Inspired by my long commute and the pretty dreadful EDM music blasting out in my gym, I’ve found myself on a bit of a podcast kick lately. Besides my usual NPR fare (If you’ve not yet listened to an episode of This American Life with Ira Glass, you’ve missed out), I’ve been checking out the […]
Hi, I’m Peter
.. and I’m the new guy. I’ve just completed my PhD in particle physics on the ATLAS experiment at CERN. I loved the physics (because “searching for extra dimensions of space” sounds so cool!) but after 8 years I decided I wanted to do something different. At heart, I’m a programmer and a hacker who […]
My First Month As an Intern At ScraperWiki
The role of an intern is often a lowly one. Intern duties usually consist of the provision of caffeinated beverages, screeching ‘can I take a message?’ into phones and the occasional promenade to the photocopier and back again. ScraperWiki is nothing like that. Since starting in late May, I’ve taken on a number of roles […]