I’ve started to wonder, just how much can we find out about a subject from Wikipedia? I’ve been wondering if I can ask serious questions and big questions to the data set to get serious and big answers out. I thought I’d start by exploring an area of Wikipedia that Read more…
A few days ago I mapped out the death places of Monarchs of England. I wanted to try the same technique on a bigger dataset and keeping on trend with some other stuff I’ve done with Reddit I decided to map the birthplace of every wrestler in Wikipedia. This is Read more…
(according to Wikipedia) This was a quick and dirty experiment to see how easy it is to auto generate an interactive map from Wikipedia/DBpedia. There are some caveats and things I still need to iron out. These are people that Wikipedia has described as a Monarch of England, they must Read more…
I’ve been informed by Davide Taibi that the LAK dataset has been updated, this update includes some paper text that I reported on, but also has lots more data. As described by Davide: This version includes papers from: – EDM conferences (2008-2014) – LAK conferences (2011-2014, 2014 only abstract since Read more…
There is a bot on Reddit that crawls through comments and looks for haiku in the text, I like the bot because everything has more of an emotional impact when it’s written as a haiku, even Reddit comments. Inspired by this I had a look online and it turns out Read more…
Sometimes I like to write bits of code that poke Wikipedia, its fun and the data is a great way to start a conversation with people. I recently teamed up with the pro wrestling fans of Reddit to find out information on wrestling stables, we did this using the structured Read more…
This is a very simple recipe, just a few lines to get an indication of tags/categories being used on a WordPress site. The idea is that I use R to read the RSS feed of the blog, pick out the tags and categories and display a pie chart of the tags being used. Since tags and categories in wordpress are set by the user it gives you an indication of what subjects the authors think their posts fit in to. It might be a useful script in keyword planning and seo, but I just use it to see how my interests are changing.
In my last post I had been thinking about technologies that online communities use and how the technology pushes people to communicate in a certain way. I pushed this out to my Google+ feed, perhaps because Google use plus metrics to an rank article but I would like to think more so because I have friends on there whose feedback I value. When my Google notification button told me I had a comment from Sheila MacNeill I was pleased, not solely because comments will get me some points in Google magic ranking algorithm but more importantly Sheila has a knack for reading through a wall of text, pulling out the important stuff and translating it in to concrete questions. This was Sheila’s comment after reading my post:
I posted an experiment on a wrestling subreddit a few days where I used DBpedia to explore the links between wrestling stables/ .To my surprise wrestling fans are really interested in the things you can find out using structured data from wikipedia. I was contacted by a graphic designer asking Read more…
For some work I plan on doing for the LACE tech focus blog I wanted to get some information off a webpage and in to an R dataframe. It turns out this is a three line solution (1 line if you throw your URL straight to the function paramaters and Read more…
