I’m just about to return from Prague, Czech Republic, where I gave a workshop at the Big Clean. What a nice little conference this was! It had two tracks: Talks and the workshop. So I didn’t get to see many of the talks :(. But this meant I had the whole day to teach people […]
guest post by Liliana Bounegru, European Journalism Centre The European Journalism Centre and the Open Knowledge Foundation invite you to the Open Interests Europe Hackathon to track the interests and money flows which shape European policy. When: 24-25 November 2012 Where: Google Campus Cafe, 4-5 Bonhill Street, EC2A 4BX London How EU money is spent is an issue that concerns everyone who […]
I went to a three-day party in Buenos Aires this past month. The first two days were talks and workshops, I gave a talk on how awesome I am and a workshop on cleaning data. The latter involved no computers and no slides, so I held it outside! I modeled an analog version of the […]
This is a guest post by Makoto Inoue, one of the organisers of this weekend’s Londinium MMXII hackathon. The Olympics! Only a few days to go until seemingly every news camera on the planet is pointed at the East End of London, for a month of sporting coverage. But for data diggers everywhere, this is […]
I wanted to save the tweets from Transparency Camp. This prompted me to turn Anna‘s basic Twitter scraper into a library. Here’s how you use it. Import it. (It only works on ScraperWiki, unfortunately.) from scraperwiki import swimport search = swimport(‘twitter_search’).search Then search for terms. search([‘picnic #tcamp12’, ‘from:TCampDC’, ‘@TCampDC’, ‘#tcamp12’, ‘#viphack’]) A separate search will […]
There’s a term in technical circles called “software archaeology” – it’s when you spend time studying and reverse-engineering badly documented code, to make it work, or make it better. Scraper writing involves a lot of this stuff. ScraperWiki’s data scientists are well accustomed with a bit of archaeology here and there. But now, we want […]
This Friday June 22nd the ScraperWiki truck will roll across the Golden Gate bridge as part of its ‘Liberate the Data’ quest. It is with the fabulous support of @MJ_Coren www.majorplanetstudios.org. It’s a big deal as it’s our first co-hosted event and the first time we’ve parked in sunny California. It is also the precursor to […]
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 […]
The ScraperWiki truck will be in St Louis, Missouri this Thursday 23rd February. The NICAR event is a wonderful opportunity for us to meet the IRE delegates and to understand the on going issues that investigative reporters face when digging up data. We already have some data sets nominated and these are listed in no […]
At our New York datacamp, we set out to liberate data, teach people to liberate data, and find stories in data. About 100 people showed up for the event, and about 40 of them attended the Learn to Scrape sessions. The hacking was punctuated by talks by Tom Lee of the Sunlight Foundation and Jake […]
