Data & Stuff // Neil Houston » research

Spotted: December 5th – December 9th

Neil H — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 22:05:30 +0000

Spotted: December 5th – December 9th:

Network&Society – Redrawing the map of Great Britain from a network of human interactions.

Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions.
Rank « Gareth Holt – A series of 13 charts and graphs produced with Ben Branagan for the UK traveling exhibition ‘Rank’: Picturing The Social Order 1516 – 2009. Commissioned by curator Alistair Robinson and exhibited at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Leeds.
http://bokardo.com/archives/the-behavior-youve-designed-for/ – I’ve given a few talks recently and by far and away the one idea that is resonating with people is the idea that the behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for
Metricly – Aggregated Dashboards for Every Business – Dive deep into your data

With your data in one place, Metricly provides a consistent and powerful set of tools to analyze your metrics – with subtotals, rollups, filters, and insights that help you take action.
Muddy – Muddy is an indexing and categorisation tool for use by people and companies with lots of content. Using information derived from Wikipedia, Muddy finds notable people, places and organisations in any webpage,

Spotted: October 19th – October 25th

Neil H — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 20:00:52 +0000

Spotted: October 19th – October 25th:

Help Me Investigate – anatomy of an investigation | Online Journalism Blog – Paul Bradshaw and Andy Brightwell conducted some research into one of the successful investigations on the crowdsourcing platform Help Me Investigate. This looks at how that investigation worked, and might assist others.
Data-as-a-Service: Factual, InfoChimps & Google Squared: Business Collaboration News « – In 2004, Tim O’Reilly’s famous Web 2.0 manifesto suggested that “data would be the next Intel Inside,” and that any Internet service of significance would be underpinned by specialized datasets, such as Amazon’s product database or Foursquare’s places.
MediaPost Publications Times Offers Details On ‘Metered-Model’ During Earnings Call 10/20/2010 – Meanwhile, the so-called "metered model" will allow readers who are referred from third-party sites such as blogs, social media networks and search engines access to specific content "without triggering the gate, which will preserve NYTimes.com's significant reach and advertising inventory," according to Robinson.
Can Twitter predict the stock market? – A new research study suggests that comments posted on the social networking site Twitter can predict swings in the US Dow Jones market.
Big Money for Companies That Can Analyze Big Data – As data volumes skyrocket, startups looking to take advantage of the opportunity in Big Data need to focus on the art of statistical-learning algorithms, says Michael Driscoll, founder of Dataspora

Spotted: May 24th – July 22nd

Neil H — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:01:49 +0000

Spotted: May 24th – July 22nd:

http://flowingdata.com/2010/04/12/data-underload-17-famous-movie-quotes-p-2/ – Movie Quotes as Infographics
Social media, BMW and the way forward | litmanlive.co.uk – Social media, BMW and the way forward
Web design birmingham | Web site design west midlands | Branding | Interior design | Design agency birmingham | 383 Project » Such Tweet Sorrow Infographic – Birmingham agency 383 have produced an infographic of the information from the Twitter version of Romeo & Juliet, #SuchTweetSorrow
IRE – Social-network analysis – The next step in data analysis

IRE and NICAR members are beginning to explore the uses of social network analysis for visualizing and diagramming relationships between individuals and businesses and institutions.

This is a new approach for journalists, but other professions have utilized this approach for decades for a wide range of research projects such as analyzing:
iA » Cosmic 140—Final Beta – This time, it’s the 140 most influential people on twitter, sorted by #name #handle #category #influence #activity. Plus: When they started tweeting and what they first said. It took quite some time until we had it in the shape we envisioned.

Spotted: May 3rd – May 5th

Neil H — Wed, 05 May 2010 13:08:48 +0000

Spotted: May 3rd – May 5th:

Google – General Elections 2010 – From Google, some good coverage of UK websites (Openly Local etc). Britain is going to the polls, and the internet is a great resource to help you make your decision. Quickly find out your MP and candidates below, with links to their blogs and Twitter pages. Then explore further, with fun and interesting election sites from around the web.
Magazine Preview – The Data-Driven Life – NYTimes.com – An interesting look at people who track their life in great detail.
About – trst.me – trst.me measures user reputation in a way far more robust than counting the number of followers. The basic idea is to look at how many people interact with you and give you their attention, weighted by how many people interact and pay attention to them
Eddy – Stame Design – Eddy is a media aggregation platform built for the public display of up-to-the-minute activity on realtime services like Twitter. It was used by Stamen to curate the NBC Olympic coverage, pretty interesting.
What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media? – WWW’10 – Research into Twitter, based off crawling the user network and looking at relationships. Touching on the thoughts of influence.

Spotted: February 24th – March 5th

Neil H — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:39:36 +0000

Spotted: February 24th – March 5th:

LastHistory » Visualizing Last.fm Listening Histories and Personal Streams – LastHistory allows you to analyze music listening histories from Last.fm through an interactive visualization and to explore your own past by combining the music you listened to with your own photos and calendar entries.
BBC – BBC Internet Blog: A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services – An interesting look into the way the BBC deal with their Digital branding and site development, to keep everything looking similiar.
Foodspotting / SXSX 2010 FREE Food Noms! – Tastespotting are publishing a list of places to find free food suring SXSW – checkout their twitter @sxswfreenoms
Guardian graphics visualising BBC spending – With all the furore over potential BBC spending cuts, just how much does the 6 Music, and Asian Network radio station really cost – and how much is that of the BBC budget. Just take a look at this simple, but insightful visualisation
The State of the Internet – JESS3 – The State of the Internet, a video by JESS3 – showing the facts about the online world of the internet
Information is beautiful: The BBC-O-Gram – An infographic showing the BBC, in all it's disparate ways – and where the money goes. Another good display by the team at The Guardian
Information is beautiful: 30 examples of creative infography – This is a beautiful set showing how creative an infographic can be, pretty inspiring.
http://infochimps.org/ – Looking for a dataset, take a look at one of the widest collections of the worlds datasets.
Oracle 10G – SQL for Modeling – Now it starts getting a bit more complex, I'll write a dummies guide approach. But basically, you are able to 'model' the output of your data, based on a predefined set of rules.
Oracle 10G – SQL for Analysis and Reporting – Oracle® Database Data Warehousing Guide – SQL For Analysis and Reporting.
So we are all aware of the plain, Select, From, Where etc. But how about the advanced analytics. Worth a read through, to extend those SQL Skills