Got some data, relating to how students move from one module to another. Rows are student ID, module code, presentation date. The flow is not well-behaved. Students may take multiple modules in one presentation, and modules may be taken in any order (which means there are loops…). My first take ...

From Stephen Wolfram, a nice phrase to describe the sorts of thing you can create using tools like Jupyter notebooks, Rmd and Mathematica notebooks: computational essays that complements the “computational narrative” phrase that is also used to describe such documents. Wolfram’s recent blog post What Is a Computational Essay?, ...

What’s an effective way of helping a student run a desktop application when their own computer won’t run the application, for whatever reason, locally? Virtualised software, running remotely, provides one solution. So here’s an example of a project that looks at doing just that:  DIT4C (“Data ...

In HexJSON HTMLWidget for R, Part 1 I described a basic HTMLwidget for rendering hexJSON maps using d3-hexJSON, and HexJSON HTMLWidget for R, Part 2 described updates for supporting colour. Having booked off today for emergency family cover that turned out not to be required, I had another stab at the ...

In my previous post – HexJSON HTMLWidget for R, Part 1 – I described a first attempt at an HTMLwidget for displaying hexJSON maps using d3-hexJSON. I had another play today and added a few extra features, including the ability to: add a grid (as demonstrated in the original d3-hexJSON examples), ...

In advance of the recent UK general election, ODI Leeds published an interactive hexmap of constituencies to provide a navigation surface over various datasets relating to Westminster constituencies: As well as the interactive front end, ODI Leeds published a simple JSON format for sharing the hex data – hexjson that allows ...

I had a bit of a play last night trying to hook a Jupyter notebook container up to an Apache Drill container using docker-compose. The idea was to have a shared data volume between the two of them, but I couldn’t for the life of me get that to ...

A week or so ago, I came up with a new chart type – race concordance charts – for looking at a motor circuit race from the on-track perspective of a particular driver. Here are a couple of examples from the 2017 F1 Grand Prix: The gap is the time to the car ...

Tinkering with a new chart type over the weekend, I spotted something rather odd in in my F1 track history charts – what look to be outliers in the form of cars that hadn’t been lapped on that lap appearing behind the lap leader of the next lap, on track. ...

Since getting started with generating templated R reports a few weeks ago, I’ve started spending the odd few minutes every race weekend around looking at ways of automating the generation of F1 qualifying and race reports. Im yesterday’s race, some of the commentary focussed on whether MAS had ...

A couple of days ago, I spotted a post by Oli Hawkins on Visualising migration between the countries of the UK which linked to a Sankey diagram demo of Internal migration flows in the UK. One of the things that interests me about the Jupyter and RStudio centred reproducible research ...

Earlier this week, I spent a day chatting to folk from the House of Commons Library as a part of a bit of temporary day-a-week-or-so bit of work I’m doing with the Parliamentary Digital Service. During one of the conversations on matters loosely geodata-related with Carl Baker, Carl mentioned ...

Over the last few years, I’ve experimented on and off with various recipes for creating text reports from tabular data sets, (spreadsheet plugins are also starting to appear with a similar aim in mind). There are several issues associated with this, including: identifying what data or insight you want ...

Way back in 2012, I posted a simple R script for trying to work out the finishing combinations in the last two races of that year’s F1 season for Fernando Alonso and Sebastien Vettel to explore the circumstances under which Alonso could take the championship (Paths to the F1 2012 Championship ...

As well as offering digital application shelves, should libraries offer, or act as instituional sponsors of, digital workbenches? I’ve previously blogged about things like SageMathCloud, and application based learning environment, and the IBM Data Scientist Workbench, and today came across another example: DHBox, CUNY’s digital humanities lab in ...