Earlier this year the UK had a General Election, which, in many quarters, was declared a landslide victory for Labour. Certainly we have - thank goodness - a new government, and the switch towards Labour in terms of the number of seats (and hence MPs) was dramatic. But there remains an ongoing debate as to … Continue reading Creating a granular “votes cast” dataset for the last century’s worth of UK General Elections
Category: Free data
How to get a Wikipedia (or other HTML) table into R as a dataframe
I recently wanted to use some data I found in a Wikipedia article for analysis in R. Acknowledging of course the historical buyer-beware status of Wikipedia data - although these days it often seems as reliable as any other source. It turns out it's pretty easy to do. You can use the rvest library, which … Continue reading How to get a Wikipedia (or other HTML) table into R as a dataframe
The Data Is Plural newsletter provides a mass of free and fascinating data
I recently chanced upon "Data Is Plural" - an email newsletter, currently on issue 370. Each week it provides a list and some commentary on "useful/curious datasets". There's a ton of links in each issue for anyone who wants data to play or work with to get stuck into. To give a taster of what … Continue reading The Data Is Plural newsletter provides a mass of free and fascinating data
The Great Resignation of British Ministers
Last week was a pretty dramatic week for UK politics. On Tuesday, Rishi Sunak and Sajid Javid, the UK's chancellor and health secretary respectively, resigned from their cabinet posts within minutes of each other, citing the incompetency and impossibility of working with Prime Minister Boris Johnson as their motivation. Over the next couple of days, … Continue reading The Great Resignation of British Ministers
Official UK Covid-19 vaccination progress data
Now that the Covid-19 vaccination program is under way, data fans might be interested in obtaining the stats of how the UK is doing in terms of vaccinations administered so far. The NHS is publishing a variety of these reports and, even better, the underlying data here. The most comprehensive data there is likely the … Continue reading Official UK Covid-19 vaccination progress data
Average age at menarche by country
A question came up recently about variations in the age at menarche - the first occurrence of menstruation for a female human - with regards to the environment. A comparison by country seemed like a reasonable first step in noting whether there were in fact any significant, potentially environmental, differences in this age. A quick … Continue reading Average age at menarche by country
data.world: the place to go for your open data needs?
Somewhere in my outrageously long list of data-related links to check out I found "data.world". Not only is that a nice URL, it also contains a worthy service that I can imagine being genuinely useful in future, if it takes off like it should. At first glance, it's a platform for hosting data - seemingly biased towards the … Continue reading data.world: the place to go for your open data needs?
Free up-to-date UK postcode latitude longitude data
Unless your data comes pre geo-encoded, if you're trying to do some UK-based geospatial analysis you'll probably need some easy way of translating addresses into latitude/longitude pairs or some similar co-ordinate system. Whilst full-address geocoders are available, if you don't actually need that level of precision then looking up a full postcode is often good enough and … Continue reading Free up-to-date UK postcode latitude longitude data
Free interactive data and analysis tools from Public Health England
Public Health England is an agency sponsored by the UK Department of Health whose aim is to "protect and improve the nation's health and wellbeing, and reduce health inequalities". They use, generate or distribute a bunch of interesting health-related data. They've a collection of many, many "data and analysis tools", linked to from this page. There's something for everyone … Continue reading Free interactive data and analysis tools from Public Health England
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
Dabbling with Data 