I’ve hit something of a creative impasse. I stopped blogging here a while ago, and whilst I think I’ve helped other people make things, I haven’t really been making things for myself.
A number of colleagues for similar reasons have successfully used the 30 days song challenge to unblock their blogging, and this has inspired me to try something similar, something to force me to make visualisations, and write about them.
So I’ve picked on a single dataset, the list of price paid for property from The Land Registry, and every day over the next month I’ll use it to make 30 small things to talk about open data and visualisation. Thirty is a nice round number and at this point seems almost unachievable. It also feels more than a little ridiculous to constrain myself to obsessing over just a single CSV file. But that's the point. To stir myself into action with something challenging, but very constrained.
The code for these articles will be open source, natch, and I’ll aim to build a portfolio site as we go along.
- Bootstrapping 13-Oct-14
- Counting things 15-Oct-14
- Minimal viable histograms 15-Oct-14
- Scattering 17-Oct-14
- Axes 18-Oct-14
- Prices 19-Oct-14
- Prices redux 20-Oct-14
- Heatmap meh 25-Oct-14
- Yearly 28-Oct-14
- LOESS curve 01-Nov-14
- Calendar 02-Nov-14
- Stacked 04-Nov-14
- Postcodes 06-Nov-14
- Hackday 07-Nov-14
- Hotspots 08-Nov-14
- Mapination 10-Nov-14
- Scattermap calendar 17-Nov-14
- Choropleth 20-Nov-14
- Bubblepleth 25-Nov-14
- Unknown prices 26-Nov-14
- Mistakes were made 01-Dec-2014
Something of a disclaimer: I am a Technical Architect with the Government Digital Service and have been working with the Land Registry to develop an alpha digital service. However these articles could be written by anyone with the time and inclination to dig into the open data, something the Land Registry encourages you to do through initiatives such as the GeoVation challenge. They certainly won’t be used to announce new services or reveal information or data which isn’t already public. The articles definitely shouldn’t be read as saying anything in an official capacity on behalf of these organisations, and you should treat my conclusions as the conjecture they are. I’m just this guy, you know?