Publications by mikerspencer
Plotting Scottish census data with some tidyverse magic
I’ve been working with the Scottish census recently, to investigate employment in land-based (agriculture, forestry and fishing) industry. A friend of mine has recently moved to Dumfries and Galloway – a rural, farming area of Scotland. He’s commented on the ageing population in the area, so I pulled out the age profile from the census for ...
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Spatial data and maps conference – FOSS4G
I’m helping organise a conference on (geo)spatial open source software – FOSS4G. We’re hosting it in the great city of Edinburgh, Scotland in September 2019. Abstract submissions: https://uk.osgeo.org/foss4guk2019/talks_workshops.html We’re very interested in hearing your tales of R, QGIS, Python, GRASS, PostGIS, etc.! Related To leave ...
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Wordcloud of conference abstracts – FOSS4G Edinburgh
I’m helping run a conference this September – FOSS4GUK. To help promote the event I’ve created a wordcloud of conference abstracts, in R! The conference is taking place in Edinburgh, Scotland at Dynamic Earth. It’s focused on free and open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G), as such is full stack. Everything from backend databases, ...
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Getting a DOI for your code
Academics have published work for centuries. Over the past couple of decades the type of work academics do has been changing. Our output is no longer constrained to peer reviewed articles, but includes reports, data, code, infographics, book chapters and many more. Some of these outputs are easy to share, but we also need to be able to demonstrat...
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Make an abstract booklet with R and LaTeX
Last week I co-ran the FOSS4GUK conference in Edinburgh. It was great fun and thoroughly exhausting. Part of the preparation work I did was to produce an abstract booklet for the conference. This post is a guide to how I automated that with R and LaTeX. R is a programming language focused on data analysis and LaTeX is a document preparation syste...
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Cartography with R and QGIS, which to choose?
I spoke at FOSS4GUK last week. Here’s my abstract: We all love maps. Like many, I grew up with the rich tapestry of Ordnance Survey landranger maps. This OS product uses clever cartography to display many different attributes at the same time. At the opposite end of the scale, we’ve all seen maps which only display one or two attributes – l...
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Conference abstract bi-grams – FOSS4GUK
I helped run a conference last week. As part of this I produced a wordcloud from the conference abstracts, although pretty it could have been more informative of the conference content. This blog post shows you how to make a network of conference bi-grams. FOSS4GUK 2019 abstract bigrams A bi-gram is a pair of words. In the last sentence “is a�...
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Council spending – open data
My local authority recently decided to publish all spending over £500 in an effort to be more transparent. Here’s a post taking an overview of what they’ve published. I’ve used R for the analysis. The dataset doesn’t contain much detail, but if you’ve analysis suggestions, please add them in the comments! You can download the spending ...
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A baby named Al*
About half the males in my team seem to be called Alasdair, but few of them spell it the same way. I live in hope the The International Organization for Standardization will fix the spelling, I can’t believe it hasn’t been higher up their agenda. Anyhoo, here’s a quick post about baby names using National Records of Scotland data and a wee ...
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Modelling Cairngorm snow to 2080
I’ve been doing some work for the Cairngorms National Park (CNP), with the James Hutton Institute under the ClimateXChange (CXC) lead from the Scottish Government. I don’t get to do much snow work these days, so it has been really fun to resurrect some of my PhD. The report was issued on Monday by the CNP, to help the CNP plan for the impacts...
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