Our third day at the Data Lab Innovation Week, kicked off with a very interesting talk on data ethics from Dr. Alastair Morrison from the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing. We were guided by Snook session leaders in the
Scraping goes off the rails
The art of scraping websites is one beset by difficulties, as I was reminded this week when re-testing a scraper that I built recently. Railway performance As part of my participation in 100 Days of Code I’ve been working
Digging down into Local Data – Openly Local, Democratic Dashboard and more
Have you seen Democratic Dashboard? You really should take a look. This site, set up by the Democratic Audit based in the LSE, has one simple aim: ” … to promote engagement in the electoral process by making an array
CodeTheCity 3 – A reflection
Day 1 On a sunny but cool Saturday in February, almost thirty people from as far afield as Edinburgh converged on the Meston Building at Aberdeen University to collaborate on some as-yet-undefined hacks of public services. They came from local
A Scotland-wide FOI search facility?
Updated (*) 17/1014 2 new bullet points at the end. At the first Code The City event, held in Aberdeen in June 2014, one of the projects which was worked on for the weekend was the setting up of a
Scraping Twitter data with Morph.io
At work we operate a number of Twitter Accounts, and we have been monitoring the number followers each has, on a monthly basis, for a number of years. The collection of the data – which we normally put into a
What next for CodeTheCity?
We kicked off CodeTheCity with our first Aberdeen event on 21st – 22nd June 2014 which really couldn’t have been better. We had some 38 volunteers – service users, service owners, coders, designers, bloggers – all of whom turned up
MatchTheCity Project at CodeTheCity
A quick update from Code The City. I’m working with the #MatchTheCity project team. Our aim is to provide some of the data and infrastructure to support other projects – such as #BigSociety. I’ve been working with Dave Morrison, the
Scraping Tools – A quick round-up
I’ve written here before about using Scraperwiki to scrape content from websites which haven’t implemented OpenData. I have even used Scraper Wiki to scrape our own website to get badly-formed content out in a structured way for a hack. Now,