Hacking Arts Council data

I lost my hackday cherry yesterday and went to the Open Data hackathon to look at the South East arts council data found at the data.gov.uk site (http://data.gov.uk/dataset/grants-for-the-arts-awards-arts-council-england). Our hosts, White October, were fantastic and welcoming (and put the kettle on as soon as I came in!) and Incuna provided the much needed pizzas for lunch.

Al Power came up with the cash visualisation here : http://www.d1080072.cp.blacknight.com/hackday/ and Andy Cotgrove came up with the cool Tableau visualisation (http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/Artsfunding/Fundingamountinteractive?:embed=yes&:tabs=yes&:toolbar=yes) using all five years of available data on the site.

I played with tag clouds to start diving into the data itself which links to further and more detailed data (which needs some serious work) and also Simile to create a timeline but I’m not 100% sure that this is successful really.

Since the hack, I’ve added the complete data set that Andy Colgreave put together to the database. I’m now trying to build a front end to it and also to create the dataset in XML and JSON to add it to CKAN.net. Perhaps the dataset is probably the easiest task and the front end can be developed in time.

I’d like to add the Heritage Lottery Fund data where is applies to arts or data from the opencharities.org website to try to build a better picture of the funding a projects that are happening.

It might take some time…

Update: Tim Davies has got an thought-provoking post on the day

2 Comments

  • I saw the demo at the hackathon in Oxford. This is a really great effort. I’d be happy to help out. Do you have the full dataset in one CSV file or Google Fusion Table yet? regards, David

  • iain_emsley wrote:

    Comments and ideas gratefully received, David. 🙂 It does need it but it would be great to redevelop this into something genuinely useful.

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