Publications by Tony Hirst
A Recipe for Automatically Going From Data to Text to Reveal.js Slides
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 to report from your dataset; (automaticall...
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Reporting in a Repeatable, Parameterised, Transparent Way
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 an NHS Digital data set describing the number of peo...
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How Reproducible Data Analysis Scripts Can Help You Route Around Data Sharing Blockers
For aaaagggggggeeeeeeesssssss now, I’ve been wittering on about how just publishing “open data” is okay insofar as it goes, but it’s often not that helpful, or at least, not as useful as it could be. Yes, it’s a Good Thing when a dataset is published in support of a report; but have you ever tried reproducing the charts, tables, or summ...
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Experimenting With Sankey Diagrams in R and Python
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 ecosystems is their support for libraries that generate interac...
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Track Concordance Charts
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 given BOT an “assist” in blocking VET, which ...
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Figure Aesthetics or Overlays?
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. If you count the number of cars on that leadlap, it’s also greater than the number of...
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From Points to (Messy) Lines
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 on track ahead (negative gap, to the left) or behind (to the right). The colour indi...
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Rolling Your Own Jupyter and RStudio Data Analysis Environment Around Apache Drill Using docker-compose
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 work using the the docker-compose version 2 or 3 (services/volumes) syntax – for some reason, any o...
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HexJSON HTMLWidget for R, Part 1
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 you to specify an i...
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HexJSON HTMLWidget for R, Part 2
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), modify the default colour of data and grid hex...
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