Publications by Tony Hirst
Generating Alerts From Guardian University Tables Data
One of the things I’ve been pondering with respect to the whole data journalism process is how journalists without a lot of statistical training can quickly get a feel for whether there may be interesting story leads in a dataset, or how they might be able to fashion “alerts” that bring attention to data elements that might be worth investi...
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Generating Sankey Diagrams from rCharts
A couple of weeks or so ago, I picked up an inlink from an OCLC blog post about Visualizing Network Flows: Library Inter-lending. The post made use of Sankey diagrams to represent borrowing flows, and by implication suggested that the creation of such diagrams is not as easy as it could be… Around the same time, @tiemlyportfolio posted a recipe...
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Negative Payments in Local Spending Data
In anticipation of a new R library from School of Data data diva @mihi_tr that will wrap the OpenSpending API and providing access to OpenSpending.org data directly from within R, I thought I’d start doodling around some ideas raised in Identifying Pieces in the Spending Data Jigsaw. In particular, common payment values, repayments/refunds and ...
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Generating d3js Motion Charts from rCharts
Remember Gapminder, the animated motion chart popularised by Hans Rosling in his TED Talks and Joy of Stats TV programme? Well it’s back on TV this week in Don’t Panic – The Truth About Population, a compelling piece of OU/BBC co-produced stats theatre featuring Hans Rosling, and a Pepper’s Ghost illusion brought into the digital age cour...
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Local Council Spending Data – Time Series Charts
In What Role, If Any, Does Spending Data Have to Play in Local Council Budget Consultations? I started wondering about the extent to which local spending transparency data might play a role in supporting consultation around new budgets. As a first pass, I’ve popped up a quick application up at http://glimmer.rstudio.com/psychemedia/iwspend2013_...
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Data Textualisation – Making Human Readable Sense of Data
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but whilst many of us may get a pre-attentive gut reaction reading from a data set visualised using a chart type we’re familiar with, how many of us actually take the time to read a chart thoroughly and maybe verbalise, even if only to ourselves, what the marks on the chart mean, and how they relate to e...
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Setting Axis Limits on ggplot Charts
I’ve been doodling some chart in R/ggplot using geom_text() to generate a labelled scatterplot. The chart actually builds up several layers using different datasets, so it’s not obvious how to set the ranges cleanly: I know the lower bound I want for the y-axis (y=0), but I want to let the upper bound float. There’s also an issue with the l...
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Using One Programming Language In the Context of Another – Python and R
Over the last couple of years, I’ve settled into using R an python as my languages of choice for doing stuff: R, because RStudio is a nice environment, I can blend code and text using R markdown and knitr, ggplot2 and Rcharts make generating graphics easy, and reshapers such as plyr make wrangling with data realtvely easy(?!) once you get into...
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Quoting Tukey on Visual Storytelling with Data
Time was when I used to be a reasonably competent scholar, digging into the literature chasing down what folk actually said, and chasing forward to see whether claims had been refuted. Then I fell out of love with the academic literature – too many papers that said nothing, too many papers that contained errors, too many papers… …but as we ...
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Recreational Data
Part of my weekend ritual is to buy the weekend papers and have a go at the recreational maths problems that are Sudoku and Killer. I also look for news stories with a data angle that might prompt a bit of recreational data activity… In a paper that may or may not have been presented at the First European Congress of Mathematics in Paris, July,...
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