analysis – Collected Works

Are you a MOOC candidate?

We love MOOCs. Using a Massive Open Online Course allows you to log-in from anywhere in the world and take part in some of the best tutorial and learning opportunities available from major centres of excellence.

The Knight Centre for Journalism, at the University of Texas in Austin, U.S. is launching a six week course in January 2013 to foster a better understanding of Infographics.

Although primarily targeted at journalists, the course would enable anyone with an interest in project management, social research, evaluative assessment or needs analysis to develop skills in the area of making data more visually compelling.

Ideal for improving reports to funders, clients or helping to pitch that ‘argument’ for your upcoming project.

You can find out more about this on-line course and how to register on the Knight Centre web pages here.

For a very modest fee, over and above the free participation in the course, your can also get a certificate…mapping your Continuous Professional development trajectory?

If you do, the best of luck with your web participation.

(Image: Creative Commons

Jess3, geo-social networks visualised)

Web-based Analysis
and Visualisation Environment

Weave - data analysis tools...

Weave is a new web based tool for use by novices and experts alike, to develop analysis and to visualise the results in a clear and informative way.

Weave has been developed at the Institute for Visualization and Perception Research of the University of Massachusetts Lowell in partnership with the Open Indicators Consortium, a fifteen member national collaborative of public and nonprofit organizations working to improve access to more and higher quality data.

As part of our ongoing list of resources to help develop understanding of and access to the tools for better data analysis, Weave is a perfect candidate.

Free and Open Source, with levels of interaction that can suit those simply exploring the techniques of data analysis and visualisation – Weave should be a go to tool for young people in the UK, wishing to explore or develop their skills in data analysis.

With the impending curriculum changes in the UK, and the governments revitalised commitment to Open Source software, Weave should be part of the new ICT landscape for young people, we would argue.

You can see a great example of the software in use delivering an analysis of the recent UK election here. ( A great U.S. view of our electoral system…).

You can see more about this software, and download it, from the Weave Wiki pages here. To see the software deployed and to interact with the data use this example page here.

You can reach the Collected Works home page here.

Crunching numbers!

Across our two organisations we crunch a lot of data and format, style and produce thousands of words and images for paper and web publication.

We are always keen to utilise powerful, cost effective tools to produce trends, analysis and short data-sets that tell a story and illustrate the evidence of our findings.

Free, open source and powerful software like R. For statisticians and analysts R offers a number of useful tools, analytical and calibrational functions to produce real clarity from long range data sets.

You can discover R on this website.

Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos have produced an excellent online resource about the use of trends and forecasting. It also contains some handy hints about using the functions of R too. See more here of the Hyndman and Athanasopoulos online book here …

These are great, free resources. Another alternative to getting abstracts of your long range data sets, or clear analysis of research findings, with press or web ready graphics to go with it – is to contact Collected Works.

Let us do the heavy lifting.