Archive for the tutorial Tag

SFTW: How to grab useful political data with the They Work For You API

It’s been over 2 years since I stopped doing the ‘Something for the Weekend’ series. I thought I would revive it with a tutorial on They Work For You and Google Refine… If you want to add political context to a spreadsheet – say you need to know what political parties a list of constituencies voted for, or the MPs
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How to collaborate (or crowdsource) by combining Delicious and Google Docs

During some training in open data I was doing recently, I ended up explaining (it’s a long story) how to pull a feed from Delicious into a Google Docs spreadsheet. I promised I would put it down online, so: here it is. In a Google Docs spreadsheet the formula =importfeed will pull information from an RSS feed and put it
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Postcards from a Text Processing Excursion

It never ceases to amaze me how I lack even the most basic computer skills, but that’s one of the reasons I started this blog: to demonstrate and record my fumbling learning steps so that others maybe don’t have to spend so much time being as dazed and confused as I am most of the [...]

Tech Tips: Making Sense of JSON Strings – Follow the Structure

Reading through the Online Journalism blog post on Getting full addresses for data from an FOI response (using APIs), the following phrase – relating to the composition of some Google Refine code to parse a JSON string from the Google geocoding API – jumped out at me: “This took a bit of trial and error…” [...]

How to create basic mashups with Yahoo! Pipes

I’ve blogged previously about what Yahoo! Pipes can do. The following describes some of the basic mashups you can create with Yahoo! Pipes – please add your own tips in the comments.