Data Unlocked

Bringing data to life

Birmingham Local Elections 2014

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I was fortunate to be able to see the count for Birmingham Local Elections this year (thank you @bccnewsroom).

Birmingham Council were very quick to publish the results on their web page, but unfortunately they did this using tables. That doesn’t make it terribly easy for anybody to come along, grab the data and reuse it in any way.

So, I wrote a quick scraper and collected the data into a CSV file which I placed in the West Midlands Open Datastore. By doing this it means that anybody can take that file, import it into another programme, such as spreadsheet software, and do some analysis on it.

I decided to use Tableau to create a quick visualisation, which you can see below. Each pie chart shows the breakdown of votes cast in the ward with the size of the pie chart determined by the total number of votes cast in the ward.


 

The data visualisation guru, @CarolineBeavon has kindly added a much more user friendly view:

If you select a party from the drop down box at the top, the map on the left will update to show you where they received their votes. The map on the right shows which party won in each ward across the city.

Further down (you may need to scroll) on the left is a breakdown of the votes cast in each ward and on the right the total number of votes cast for each party across the city.

Creating a visualisation that helps people explore election results isn’t easy. We hope what we’ve done is useful and welcome suggestions of other ways that it might be done.

Four interesting facts about school admissions in Birmingham

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According to The Guardian, this year 70.3% of Birmingham parents/carers “won” a place for their child at their first place secondary school. That’s a pretty good percentage, although it is apparently down by 3% on last year.

At Data Unlocked we’ve being doing work on school admissions, especially in Birmingham, for a number of years now. Following a recent Freedom of Information request we have been able to break down how children from Birmingham get into Birmingham secondary schools, based on the selection criteria.

Birmingha School Admissions

Birmingham Secondary School Admissions, by criteria, 2013

To clarify: this is children in Birmingham who are offered a place at a Birmingham secondary school. Children from outside Birmingham and Birmingham children who travel to school outside Birmingham, aren’t included in these figures.

From this, we’ve pulled out four interesting facts, or observations:Continue Reading

West Midlands Open Data Store

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The Saturday before last, myself and Mike from Data Unlocked were at the Open Data Day event at Birmingham City University (BCU) which was run by Andrew MacKenzie and Pauline Roche of Open Mercia. Here we attempted to establish “An Open Data Store in a Day”. The reason for this was because we wanted to experiment with a community run site that published and linked to open data across multiple organisations.

I did some preparatory work so that we had an instance of Ckan up and running in time for the start at 10am. By the end of the day we have over 50 resources loaded up to the store. This included such datasets as the last 10 years of grants that the BIG Lottery Fund have made in the West Midlands and the Joint Industry Committee for Regional Media Research’s newspaper circulation figures across the region.

openDataDayByJuliaHigginbottom

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