As you’ve probably noticed, Zarino and the team recently upgraded all of your scraper pages to have a lovely new, more useful look. So we’re rolling out a new set of introductory screencasts going through our new look site and giving you a bit of a flavour of the many things you can do on ScraperWiki. […]
Meet Carl Plant – He Wants an Army of Armchair Health Researchers
I think more can be done with NHS data. We are seeing health data being published in such places as the NHS Information Centre, the Office for National Statistics, data.gov.uk, health observatories and various institutions such as the Royal College of GPs. There’s a range of useful NHS data available if you know where to […]
ScraperWiki scrapers: now 53% more useful!
It’s Christmas come early at ScraperWiki HQ as we deliver—like elves popping boxes under the data digging Christmas tree—a bunch of great new improvements to the ScraperWiki site. We’ve been working on these for a while, so it’s great to finally let you all use them! First up: a new look for your scrapers The […]
With Tools, Tables and Tours: We’re Looking to Liberate Data Across the US
As part of the Knight News Challenge entry, we at ScraperWiki said we would roll out Journalism Data Camps across the U.S. We had done what we called “Hacks and Hackers Hack Day” events across the U.K. and Ireland, bringing journalists and coders together. This happened at the same time as HacksHackers in the U.S. — great minds and whatnot! Now we’re scaling up when it comes […]
Solving Healthcare Problems with Open Source Software
This year, EHealth Insider brought a new feature to their annual EHI Live exhibition: a healthcare skunkworks that gave visitors the chance to ask questions about how open source software can be used to solve healthcare problems. ScraperWiki, of course had to be one of the invited guests to exhibit at the skunkworks. So as is our way, we […]
How to get along with an ASP webpage
Fingal County Council of Ireland recently published a number of sets of Open Data, in nice clean CSV, XML and KML formats. Unfortunately, the one set of Open Data that was difficult to obtain, was the list of sets of open data. That’s because the list was separated into four separate pages. The important thing […]
Some ScraperWikiLovin’ at MozFest
This weekend saw ideas made reality, collaborations fostered and the future web bloom. The Mozilla Festival was all about making the web and making it happen in two days! Here at ScraperWiki we like doing that with data, so as well as contributing to the Data Driven Journalism Handbook, we held a quick fire ScraperWiki […]
Which witch is which?
I hope you all had a spooky Halloween and have gorged yourselves on candy. In keeping with the festive cheer, The Guardian Datastore has hopped aboard and with a digger in resident, Chris Blower, and scraped the court cases of Scottish witches. Thanks to Lisa Evans we can now see that the most common reason for a […]
Growing back to the Future: Allotments in the UK, open data stories and interventions
This is a guest blog post from Farida Vis. She attended EuroHack at the Open Government Data Camp 2011. It consisted of a series of short talks combined with plenty of opportunities for hacking in groups in the second part the workshop. On the day, we were given an introduction to data driven journalism by data journalist Nicolas Kayser-Brill, who […]
Meet Data Without Borders
Whilst navigating the rugged landscape of ‘Big Data‘, we’ve crossed many barriers, traversed wide plains and battled through choppy weather. Along the journey we’ve picked up a lot of hitchhikers (almost 5,000) and laid down a lot of data tracks (over 75 million records in our data store). We’ve also come across some interesting creatures […]