We’re in Washington DC, the nation’s capital and US HQ! The city is bathed in spring sunlight, the blossoms are out and there’s a bit of a buzz about the town. The ScraperWiki truck is getting ready to park at The Washington Post on Friday and Saturday for our 3rd major US Journalism Data Camp […]
International Data Journalism Awards….deadline fast approaching..(10th April 2012)
Everybody is talking and trying to do ‘data journalism’ and the first ever International Data Journalism Awards have been established to recognise the huge effort that people are making in this field. It’s a great opportunity to showcase your work. Backed by Google, the prizes are generous at €45,000 (over $55,000) to six winners and […]
Fine set of graphs at the Office of National Statistics
It’s difficult to keep up. I’ve just noticed a set of interesting interactive graphs over at the Office of National Statistics (UK). If the world is about people, then the most fundamental dataset of all must be: Where are the people? And: What stage of life are they living through? A Population Pyramid is a […]
Telling Stories with Data: Life at a Hispanic Serving University in Texas!
Guest post by Cindy Royal I’m an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University in San Marcos. We’re just a short distance from Austin, with a large (>34,000 students) and diverse campus. Since I joined the faculty at Texas State, I have been focusing on advancing students’ technology […]
More Python libraries!
I installed some new Python libraries and restructured the Python libraries documentation page. Some highlights Gensim is “Topic Modelling for Humans”. Read the introduction to the documentation. I’m looking for an excuse to play with it. unidecode transliterates Unicode into ASCII. It’s helpful for things like making column names. Beautiful Soup 4 beta (It’s a […]
Job advert: Data scientist / web scraper
Pool temperatures, company registrations, dairy prices … ScraperWiki is a Silicon Valley style startup, in Liverpool, UK. We’re changing the world of open data, and how data science is done together on the Internet. We’re looking for a data scientist who… Loves data, and what can be done with it. Able to code in Ruby […]
Introducing status.scraperwiki.com
So you can find out if parts of ScraperWiki aren’t working, we’ve added a new status page. It’s called status.scraperwiki.com, and looks like this: The page and the status monitoring is done by the excellent Pingdom. We’ve been using it for a while to alert us to outages, so there’s quite a bit of history […]
From CMS to DMS: C is for Content, D is for Data
This is a joint blog post by Francis Irving, CEO of ScraperWiki, and Rufus Pollock, Founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. It’s being cross-posted to both blogs. Content Management Systems, remember those? It’s 1994. You haven’t heard of the World Wide Web yet. Your brother goes to a top university. He once overheard some geeks […]
The Data Hob
Keeping with the baking metaphor, a hob is a projection or shelf at the back or side of a fireplace used for keeping food warm. The central part of a wheel into which the spokes are inserted looks kind of like a hob, and is called the hub (etymology). Lately there has been a move […]
The UN peacekeeping mission contributions mostly baked
Many of the most promising webscraping projects are abandoned when they are half done. The author often doesn’t know it. “What do you want? I’ve fully scraped the data,” they say. But it’s not good enough. You have to show what you can do with the data. This is always very hard work. There are […]