This is a guest blog post by Elizaveta Gaufman, a researcher and lecturer at the University of Tübingen. The theme of my PhD dissertation is enemy images in contemporary Russia. However, I am not only interested in the governmental rhetoric which is relatively easy to analyse, but also in the way enemy images are circulating on […]
Digitally enhanced social research
Guest post by Dr Rebecca Sandover. The continued expansion of social media activity raises many questions of how this ever-changing digital life spreads ideas and how ‘contagious’ online events arise. Exeter University’s Contagion project has been running since September 2013, funded by the UK Economics and Social Research Council to explore how such events spread […]
Getting SkilledUp
Guest Post by SkilledUp‘s Nick Gidwani. ScraperWiki is a revolutionary tool. Not just because it allows you to collect data, but because it allows anyone – including journalists who now must specialize in data – to organize and draw conclusions from vast data sets. That skill set (organizing what is now called “big data”) was […]
Combining survey data with scraped data to tell a story
Guest post by Dan Armstrong My last three jobs have involved telling stories with survey data. Since every story requires a conflict, I look for conflicts. For instance, I’ll go to CFOs and ask them if their marketing people are doing a good job. Then I’ll ask the marketers if they think they’re doing a […]
Glue Logic and Flowable Data
Guest post by Tony Hirst As well as being a great tool for scraping and aggregating content from third party sites, Scraperwiki can be used as a transformational “glue logic” tool: joining together applications that utilise otherwise incompatible data formats. Typically, we might think of using a scraper to pull data into one or more […]