Author Archives: Ian Hopkinson

About Ian Hopkinson

I've worked as a scientist for the last 20 years, at various universities, a large health and personal care company and now @ScraperWiki, a software startup. I am @SmallCasserole on Twitter.

Book review: Interactive Data Visualization for the web by Scott Murray

Posted on May 9, 2013

Next in my book reading, I turn to Interactive Data Visualisation for the web by Scott Murray (@alignedleft on twitter). This book covers the d3 JavaScript library for data visualisation, written by Mike Bostock who was also responsible for the Protovis … Continue reading →

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Book review: JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford

Posted on April 23, 2013

This week I’ve been programming in JavaScript, something of a novelty for me. Jealous of the Dear Leader’s automatically summarize tool I wanted to make something myself, hopefully a future post will describe my timeline visualising tool. Further motivations are … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Machine Learning in Action by Peter Harrington

Posted on April 17, 2013

Machine learning is about prediction, and prediction is a valuable commodity. This sounds pretty cool and definitely the sort of thing a data scientist should be into, so I picked up Machine Learning in Action by Peter Harrington to get … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Data Visualization: a successful design process by Andy Kirk

Posted on April 2, 2013

My next review is of Andy Kirk’s book Data Visualization: a successful design process. Those of you on Twitter might know him as @visualisingdata, where you can follow his progress around the world as he delivers training. He also blogs … Continue reading →

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Book Review: R in Action by Robert I. Kabacoff

Posted on March 27, 2013

This is a review of Robert I. Kabacoff’s book R in Action which is a guided tour around the statistical computing package, R. My reasons for reading this book were two-fold: firstly, I’m interested in using R for statistical analysis and … Continue reading →

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Tools of the trade

Posted on March 14, 2013

With the experience of a whole week of ScraperWiki, I am starting to appreciate the core tools of the professional Data Scientist. In the past I’ve written scrapers in Matlab, C# and Python. However, the house language for scraping at … Continue reading →

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I am Ian, Ian I am*

Posted on March 5, 2013

I have an 8 year itch: I spent the first 8 years of my career as an academic ending up a lecturer in physics at UMIST. Then I was a research scientist at a large “fast moving consumer goods” company … Continue reading →

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Enterprise data analysis and visualization

Posted on January 29, 2013

The topic for today is a paper[1] by members of the Stanford Visualization Group on interviews with data analysts, entitled “Enterprise Data Analysis and Visualization: An Interview Study”. This is clearly relevant to us here at ScraperWiki, and thankfully their analysis fits in with … Continue reading →

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Scraping the Royal Society membership list

Posted on December 28, 2012

To a data scientist any data is fair game, from my interest in the history of science I came across the membership records of the Royal Society from 1660 to 2007 which are available as a single PDF file. I’ve … Continue reading →

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