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…
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.
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…
In pro wrestling a stable is a group of wrestlers who form an alliance and wrestle together, they help each other out the way typically team mates would, for example by sneaking sledgehammers in to the ring when the referees have their backed turned. When I was younger my favorite Read more…
A while ago I used a combination of Facepager and R to find reoccurring phrases in the comments section of the BNP’s Facebook page. The idea was based around a conversation with a friend where I explained that I found it hard to talk to BNP supporters because I just Read more…
I’ve been playing with the Twitter API to see how easy it is to take stats about event backchat on Twitter. While playing with the API I noticed it was very easy to get data out which at first made me wonder why anybody even bothers with Twubs style tools, Read more…
This is a very basic how to, I’ve just saved here this here for future reference I wanted to build game that had a life of it’s own. To do this I wanted to get lots of lists of things. A list of emotions, list of names, etc etc. If Read more…
