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 […]
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 […]
Diggers and Dinosaurs – Scraping at the Mozilla Festival
In a complete paradigm shift of the epic battle between Godzilla and Mothra we are turning our backs on the old claymation medium and embracing the digital age where dinosaurs and diggers (yes, I am aware we are a machine and not a moth) can roam free across the lawless plains of web 2.0. Both […]
Amazing Places Scrapers Go – The Big Clean
Earlier this month, there’s been some underground scraping action happening in Central Europe. We noticed this spark of activity and upon further investigation it was revealed to be a spill over from The Big Clean. At the beginning of this moth, there was Open Scraper Challenge happening in 3 hackerspaces in Czech Republic and Slovakia, in Prague, […]
Scraping Government Data for the Open Government Data Camp
Come one, come all and gather ye ’round the fantastical scraping table at the Open Government Data Camp at Warsaw. Here you will see such mythical beasts the Irish man with the gift of the gab and the German obsessed with numbers and efficiency he has become part database. So head to Soho Factory in Warsaw, […]
#media2012: Hacking the Olympics
Last weekend, Scraperwiki hosted a ‘hacks and hackers’ event at FACT in Liverpool as part of Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival, focusing on scraping data related to the Olympics for the #media2012 network. There is plenty of information, plenty of activity and plenty of action that is happening and can be done in order to […]
‘Big Data’ in the Big Apple
My colleague @frabcus captured the main theme of Strata New York #strataconf in his most recent blog post. This was our first official speaking engagement in the USA as a Knight News Challenge 2011 winner. Here is my twopence worth! At first we were a little confused at the way in which the week long […]
Help Get Olympic Data off the Start Line
As part of Media2012 we’ll be running (no pun intended) a Hacks and Hackers Data Journalism workshop. It’s part of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival. It’ll be on 2nd October from 11:00-17:00 at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) Medialab, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ. So if you’re interested in sports data and want […]
Driving the Digger Down Under
G’day, Henare here from the OpenAustralia Foundation – Australia’s open data, open government and civic hacking charity. You might have heard that we were planning to have a hackfest here in Sydney last weekend. We decided to focus on writing new scrapers to add councils to our PlanningAlerts project that allows you to find out […]
CIJ Workshop in Blog Form!
Here’s an introduction to a little thing called ScraperWiki. Please watch it so that you don’t develop bad habits that could annoy the programmers you want helping you! OBJECTIVES FOR THIS WORKSHOP Have your own ScraperWiki account and understand all the features and navigation of the site Scrape twitter for different terms and export the […]