Messing with Data

Tony Hirst,Dept of Communication and Systems,The Open University #lak11

How can non-programmers do the sort of things that we might

normally think we need a developer to do?

“Data Is A Dish Best Served Raw”

http://eagereyes.org/

ND

Discovery

Acquisition as data

Representation

Cleansing

(Visual) Analysis

APIs, screenscraping and standardised document formats

Representation

Structured OR or unstructured

Human readable (text) or opaque document format?

Google Spreadsheets as a database

=QUERY('ISO Country Codes'!A2:B268, "select A,B where A contains 'FRANCE' limit 1")))

Many Eyes

Visualising Networks

[ Context – resource discovery in special interest areas ]

http://flic.kr/p/9mvfHh

Put the data to work:

Google CSEblogroll

More views ondelicious…

Graph of folk who follow three or more people (ish) who tweeted a link to soti/rin blog post

Data Cleansing

Google Refine

Stanford Data Wrangler

Google Analytics

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataExplorer.html

http://bit.ly/fzj9yv

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