Computational & Data Journalism @ Cardiff

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Sharing Jupyter notebooks online

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You have a great Jupyter notebook you’ve been working on. If only you could share it with the world: here are some options for getting your notebook online.

If you just want to show a notebook to people without them running the code, nbviewer does the job by showing the cells and their output (beware long dataframes that won’t be cropped). Just put the notebook file (.ipynb) on github and supply the link to nbviewer. If your visitor likes what they see, they can immediately launch a functioning version via a Binder link, or download the .ipynb file. Here’s a simple example of what the user sees.

If your notebook is in a github repo you can skip nbviewer and build a working version of the notebook via https://mybinder.org/. Just supply the repository url and it will serve up all the .ipynb files, with the notebook cells ready to run.

jupyter{book} lets you build a complete book using notebook elements. Here’s an example with some notebooks.

The Voilà package “turns Jupyter notebooks into standalone web applications” or if you prefer, it puts only the cell output on the webpage. Where it gets really useful is by involving widgets from ipywidget to allow user interaction.

A github repo with Github Pages enabled can run as a webpage using a package called nbinteract but I’ve found it has trouble loading widgets, as seen in some of the tutorial pages.

Of course, Jupyter notebooks are not the only option: Kaggle, Google Colab and many more. There’s an episode of the podcast Talk Python To Me about a paper that reviewed 60 (!) different notebooks.

Chatbots in the Classroom: Education Innovation Research

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The Computational and Data Journalism team has recently been awarded research funding from the University Centre for Education Innovation to investigate the use of chatbots in the classroom.

The project “proposes the development of chat bots as part of the teaching and learning team to support learning and automate everyday issues to alleviate staff workload.

“This would essentially create an on-demand classroom assistant who can provide informational support whatever schedule students choose to keep outside of the classroom environment and increase their overall satisfaction levels as a result.”

We’ve just hired a 3rd year Computer Science student, Stuart Clark to work with us on the project, and he has started swiftly, working to identify sources of data within the university that such a system can plug into, designing system architectures and interfaces, and beginning work on the implementation.

We’ll follow up this development work over the summer with a live trial of the system in Autumn to see how well it works and assess whether this sort of technology can be successfully used by students and lecturers alike to improve information flow and ease administrative pressures.

We’ll continue to blog about the project as it progresses over the next few months.

Visualising the Creative Industries in Cardiff: CUROP project

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This summer, our team is running a project funded by the CUROP scheme here at Cardiff University. The Creative Cardiff team have collected a large amount of data on the creative industries in Cardiff, and are now looking for new ways to explore and communicate this data. Our summer project is aiming to do just that, bringing in an undergraduate student to gain some experience of the research environment, carry out some exploratory data analysis, and then design and implement visualisations to aid public understanding of the data.

 

Current mapping of Creative Cardiff data

 

We’ve just recruited our student, Samuel Jones, a first year student in the School of Computer Science and Informatics, and we’ll be getting started on the project soon. As we go, we’ll keep the site updated with progress, and point out the final outcomes once they’re released

Sustainable Software Institute – Research Data Visualisation Workshop

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Last week I gave a talk and delivered a hands on session at the Sustainable Software Institute’s ‘Research Data Visualisation Workshop‘ which was held at Manchester University. It was a really engaging event, with a lot of good discussion on the issues surrounding data visualisation.

Professor Jessie Kennedy from Edinburgh Napier University gave a great keynote looking at a some key design principles in visualisation, including a number of studies I hadn’t seen before but will definitely be including in my teaching in future.

I gave a talk on ‘Human Science Visualisation’ which really focused on a couple of key issues. Firstly, I tried to illustrate the importance of interactivity in complex visualisations. I then talked about how we as academic researchers need publish our interactive visualisations in posterity, and how we should press academic publishers to help us communicate our data to readers. Finally, I wanted to point people towards the excellent visualisation work being done by data journalists, and that the newsrooms are an excellent source of ideas and tips for data visualisation. The slides for my talk are here. It’s the first time I’ve spoken about visualisation outside of the classroom, and it was a really fun talk to give.

We also had two great talks from Dr Christina Bergmann and Dr Andy South, focusing on issues of biological visualisation and mapping respectively. All the talks generated some good discussion both in the room and online, which was fantastic to see.

In the afternoon I lead a hands on session looking at visualising data using d3. This was the first time I’d taught a session using d3 v4, which made things slightly interesting. I’m not fully up to speed with all the areas of the API that have changed, so getting the live coding right first time was a bit tricky, but I think I managed. Interestingly, I feel that the changes made to the .data(), .exit(), .enter(), update cycle as discussed in Mike’s “What Makes Software Good” make a lot more sense from a teaching perspective. The addition of .merge() in particular helps a great deal. As you might expect from a d3 workshop that lasted a mere three hours, I’m not entirely convinced that everybody ‘got’ it, but I think a most went away satisfied.

Overall it was a very successful workshop. Raniere Silva did an excellent job putting it together and running the day, and I really enjoyed it. I’m looking forward to seeing what other people thought about it too.