New website launch from the Office of National Statistics

Yesterday, the UK Office of National Statistics, the institution that is "responsible for collecting and publishing statistics related to the economy, population and society", launched its new website. As well as a new look, they've concentrated on improving the search experience and making it accessible to mobile device users. The front page is a nice at-a-glance … Continue reading New website launch from the Office of National Statistics →

Kaggle now offers free public dataset and script combos

Kaggle, a company most famous for facilitating competitions that allow organisations to solicit the help of teams of data scientists to solve their problems in return for a nice big prize, recently introduced a new section useful even for the less competitive types: "Kaggle Datasets". Here they host "high quality public datasets" you can access for free. … Continue reading Kaggle now offers free public dataset and script combos →

You made a chart. So what?

In the latest fascinating Periscope video from Chris Love, the conversation centred around a question that can be summarised as "Do data visualisations need a 'so what'?". There are many ways of rephrasing this: one could ask whether it is (always) the responsibility of the viz author to highlight the story that their visualisations show? … Continue reading You made a chart. So what? →

The journey towards creating a Tableau Web Data Connector

I recently watched a video by Tableau/Alteryx/general guru Chris Love in which he emphasised the importance for people to not only retrospectively present their mindblowing successes at cajoling Tableau into running the universe - but also the journey leading up to that point, including any outright failures. After all, there is no shame in failing to do what one sets out … Continue reading The journey towards creating a Tableau Web Data Connector →