Publications by Tony Hirst

An R-chitecture for Reproducible Research/Reporting/Data Journalism

15.07.2012

It’s all very well publishing a research paper that describes the method for, and results of, analysing a dataset in a particular way, or a news story that contains a visualisation of an open dataset, but how can you do so transparently and reproducibly? Wouldn’t it be handy if you could “View Source” on the report to see how the analysis...

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At A Glance View of the 2012 Olympics Heptathlon Performances

04.08.2012

I spent most of today, err, yesterday, failing to hold back the tears as the medal performances from the Team GB Olympians kept rolling in… So to celebrate one of those wonderful performances, here are a couple of quick sketches of how Jessica Ennis made her medal in the Heptathlon. (The data is cut and pasted from the BBC website and available...

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Creating Olympic Medal Treemap Visualisations Using OTS R Libraries

07.08.2012

In London Olympics 2012 Medal Tables At A Glance? I posted some treemap visualisations of the Olympics medal tables generated using a Google Visualisation Chart treemap component. I thought it might be worth posting a quick R generated example too, using the off-the-shelf/straight out of CRAN treemap component. (If you want to play along, downloa...

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Open Research Data Processes: KMi Crunch – Hosted RStudio Analytics Environment

23.08.2012

One of the possible barriers to widespread adoption of open notebook science is knowing where to start. Video reports of lab experiments hosted on Youtube can be easily embedded in a hosted WordPress blog; a MediaWiki wiki can be used to provide one page per experiment, with change tracking/history on each page and a shadow page for commentary an...

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F1 2012 Mid-Season Review

30.08.2012

Rather belatedly, I got around to posting a series of posts summarising the Formula One season to date: F1 2012 Mid-Season Review – Grid/Classification Analysis: for example, how do the drivers’ grid and final classifications compare? F1 2012 Mid-Season Review – Pit Stops: for example, how does pit stop performance across the teams compar...

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Merging Data Sets Based on Partially Matched Data Elements

26.09.2012

A tweet from @coneee yesterday about merging two datasets using columns of data that don’t quite match got me wondering about a possible R recipe for handling partial matching. The data in question related to country names in a datafile that needed fusing with country names in a listing of ISO country codes. The original data set had the form: ...

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its the Gramma an punctuashun wot its’ about, Rgiht?

04.10.2012

This is another of those confluence style posts, where a handful of things I’ve read in quick succession seem to phase lock in my mind: (brought to mind in part via @downes a week or so ago: How to Synch 32 Metronomes) The first was a post by Alan Levine on Making Text Work, which describes a simple technique for making text overlays on photog...

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The Race to the F1 2012 Drivers’ Championship – Initial Sketches

16.11.2012

In part inspired by the chart described in The electoral map sans the map, I thought I’d start mulling over a quick sketch showing the race to the 2012 Formula One Drivers’ Championship. The chart needs to show tension somehow, so in this first really quick and simple rough sketch, you really do have to put yourself in the graph and start rea...

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Interactive Scenarios With Shiny – The Race to the F1 2012 Drivers’ Championship

18.11.2012

In Paths to the F1 2012 Championship Based on How They Might Finish in the US Grand Prix I posted a quick hack to calculate the finishing positions that would determine the F1 2012 Drivers’ Championship in today’s United States Grand Prix, leaving a tease dangling around the possibility of working out what combinations would lead to a VET or ...

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Quick Shiny Demo – Exploring NHS Winter Sit Rep Data

28.11.2012

Having spent a chink of the weekend and a piece of yesterday trying to pull NHS Winter sitrep data into some sort of shape in Scraperwiki, (described, in part, here: When Machine Readable Data Still Causes “Issues” – Wrangling Dates…), I couldn’t but help myself last night and had a quick go at using RStudio’s Shiny tooling to put tog...

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