CULTURE OF INSIGHT

Our blog has moved to cultureofinsight.com/blog

Jan 1, 2018

We have recently re-built our main website to have better integration between our blog content and website homepage. So you can now find our blog at cultureofinsight.com/blog. We’re in the process of migrating old posts onto the new site but this is still currently ongoing. As such, we’ll be keeping this site online for the forseeable so that we don’t break links to content out in the twitter ether, but all new posts will now be published over on the new site, so be sure to head over there for the latest content!

Migrating from Xcelsius Dashboards on a Budget

Jan 1, 2018

The Death of Flash SAP XCelsius was the Ford Fiesta of the BI industry. Inexpensive to run, simple to implement. Businesses could get dashboards up and running in days or hours. We’ve helped clients design over 1,000 XCelsius dashboards over time, so we know how practical and adaptable they were. But then the industry went and killed Flash. Old XCelsius dashboards, which worked perfectly well last month and posed no threat to anyone’s IT security, are now downloaded and treated as high-risk by browsers, or blocked outright.

Reproducible Shiny App Development with Modules

Jan 1, 2018

Happy New Year to one and all! As data scientists/analysts/researchers/programmers/anything else on that crazy data science Venn diagram, I’m assuming all of our new years resolutions involve visualising our data with more sophistication and finesse. So with that in mind, I thought it was high time for a post about the joys of modularizing your shiny app code. New Year, new improved workflows with emphasis on efficiency & reproducibility, amiright?

How Market Research Can Tidy Up

Oct 10, 2017

Synopsis Market Research is great at compiling the right data, but not so good at making it easy to use. This isn’t about “storytelling”. It’s about the data itself, and clarity on what delivering it actually means. Getting the data out of siloes like tabs and SPSS where it cannot adequately be mined, and out into the big wide world as Tidy Data.

When It Rains, It Pours

Oct 10, 2017

A Dive Into Some Global Flooding Data I always like to keep a look out for interesting open data sets. One great resource for such things is Jeremy Singer-Vine’s Data is Plural weekly newsletter that brings together a collection of “useful, curious datasets” for us all to enjoy and wrangle with. One that cropped up last week was The Dartmouth Flood Observatory’s Global Archive of Large Flood Events.

Animated Maps in R with SF and gganimate

Sep 9, 2017

There’s been some great animated maps in the data viz world of late. Most notably this stunner by John Muyskens for the Washington Post, showing the diverted flight paths of planes getting themselves into the line of the recent solar eclipse. What’s more it was made with R and ggplot2! Have a look here: Hundreds of aircraft flocked to the moon's shadow during Monday's eclipse. Animation by @JohnMuyskens Data courtesy of @flightradar24 pic.

Recreating an Economist WDI Chart in R

Jul 7, 2017

Background I really liked this blogpost by Peter Ellis that was recently brought to my attention by everyone’s favourite #rstats tweeter, Mara Averick: ???? code-through: “Inter-country inequality and the World Development Indicators” by @ellis2013nz https://t.co/zIjgqjPqKc #rstats #dataviz pic.twitter.com/h1sUfO2PPJ — Mara Averick (@dataandme) July 22, 2017 In the post, Peter recreates some of the charts from Branko Milanovic’s highly acclaimed book ‘Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization’ using World Development Indicator data from the World Bank.

Scraping & Swarming: A Visual Exploration of Facebook Data in R

Jul 7, 2017

TL;DR If you’re looking for a tool to scrape all the posts in facebook page/group with a link and have the data presented to you in a searchable, filterable table then check out the shiny app I made for this purpose by clicking on the image below (very niche market, I know). If however, that’s not why you’re here, and would like to look at some interesting ways of visualising social media data (or any kind of events over time data), please read on.

Building Dot Density Maps with UK Census Data in R

Jun 6, 2017

UPDATE: We’ve just done an update to this tutorial on our new blog using R Spatial’s new simple features package! It’s a much nicer workflow than the one below so head over to Multivariate Dot-Denisty Maps in R with sf and ggplot2 now to check it out. Cheers! Background I recently came across Eric Fisher’s brilliant collection of dot density maps that show racial and ethnic divisions within US cities.

Hard Earned Data Deserves More Attention

May 5, 2017

Digging into some electoral data The 2017 election is hardly interesting, from a data perspective. We all know the map will be mostly blue with some red blobs and a yellow top. Like Maggie Simpson, as the Radio Times pointed out… It’s often the same with research and data we use for business. Research teams carefully construct management reports each month but when little changes, not much attention is paid. Considering how much we paid for the data, or how much is traded on it, that feels like a missed opportunity.