It was not an accident that the 2013 European Data Forum was held in Dublin given that Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the European Union runs until June 30th. The venue was Croke Park Conference Centre which over looks Ireland’s premier sporting stadium and an historic landmark. It was organised by the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), […]
Hi, I’m Matthew Hughes
Hello! My name is Matthew Hughes, and I am Scraperwiki’s newest intern, where I will be working predominantly on product and tools alongside the likes of Chris Blower and David Jones. Currently, I’m reading Computing at Liverpool Hope University, where I am about to enter my second year of study. When I’m not hammering out […]
It’s all about tools
The new ScraperWiki is all about tools. People talk a lot about data, big data, data mining, data science. But the action happens in tools. Tools like Excel, R, SPSS, Python. Or, on the new ScraperWiki, tools like View in a table, Summarise this data and Query with SQL. We’ve just pushed an improvement to […]
Programmers past, present and future
As a UX designer and part-time anthropologist, working at ScraperWiki is an awesome opportunity to meet the whole gamut of hackers, programmers and data geeks. Inside of ScraperWiki itself, I’m surrounded by guys who started programming almost before they could walk. But right at the other end, there are sales and support staff who only […]
10 technical things you didn’t know about the new ScraperWiki
1. Scrapers are now completely language neutral. Not just Python and Ruby – but anything open source that can make or read an SQLite file, from R to Clojure. 2. Scrapers can have as many files as they like. So you can use modules, write separate tests… whatever you want to do. 3. You can […]
Job: Product Marketing Manager
Our new platform and associated data science services are going well, so we’re hiring an ambitious marketeer to help us communicate better what we’re doing. Full job advert and how to apply here It’s our first full time marketing role, so since we’re a start up it needs to be someone quite versatile. It’s also a great […]
Quick start guide: Make your first data tool
The new ScraperWiki is all about tools, like a hammer rather than a washing machine. For data scientists and developers we’ve made a new quick start guide, that takes you through making your first tool. We’re looking forward to seeing what kind of tools you make!
Tools liberate your data from apps
An app is something that makes it easy for a user to achieve one thing. It’s an appliance. Like a washing machine. On the new ScraperWiki platform we talk a lot about tools. A tool is something you use with materials and with other tools to achieve a variety of things. Like a hammer. At ScraperWiki, […]
Why the World Got Stuck on Spreadsheets and the Future of Data Manipulation
Guest post by Dan Thompson In 1979 a Harvard MBA student and former programmer at DEC, invented something that fundamentally change the world of IT and which still affects everyone with a desk job today. What Dan Bricklin had created was the spreadsheet – in its modern form at least. There had been number crunching […]
Summarise #4: Images and domains
(This is the fourth part in a series of posts about the “Summarise this dataset” tool on the new beta.scraperwiki.com platform – go there and sign up for free to try it out! The code is open source; take a look in facts.js for the key parts) URLs are a type of data that is particularly […]