• How to use R and shiny to name your child

    Step 1 Get pregnant. There are many excellent guides and hacks out there to help you with this part of the process. Step 2 Argue with partner for several weeks about baby names. Go backwards and forwards on several names. Contemplate divorce. Step 3 Using Hadley Wickham’s awesome babynames package,...

  • Using gganimate to map NEET patterns in England

    I have been playing around with the newly revamped gganimate package recently. I’ve found it so intuitive, especially having used d3 before. You can really make some amazing graphs by utilising only a few lines of extra code. For example: below is the full code (including cleaning/transformation) I used to...

  • Data driven parenting - Using web scraping to evaluate the longevity of a baby bath

    Like many soon-to-be parents, my husband and I are currently trying to navigate all the new products we need to buy before the little chap makes his arrival…clothes, wraps, nappy changing tables, you name it. One of the new things we’ll need is a baby bath, as we don’t have...

  • Mapping life satisfaction with Leaflet in R

    It wasn’t until after I went through the whole process of using Leaflet.js that I discovered that there is a Leaflet package for R!. The documentation promised that “this R package makes it easy to integrate and control Leaflet maps in R”, and they weren’t wrong. To test it out,...

  • Building a survey input tool in shiny

    One of my roles at West London Zone involves overseeing the partner data system - that is, the collection of attendance and engagement data from 20 partners, operating around 60 sessions a week, across 9 schools. A major part of the challenge is the flexibility of our needs-based partner allocation...

  • Mapping child deprivation in West London using R and Leaflet.js

    West London, encompassing neighbourhoods like Notting Hill, Chelsea, Knightsbridge, and Kensington, is one of the most economically advantaged areas in the UK. However, within the boroughs of Hammersmith and Fulham, and Kensignton and Chelsea, there are also pockets of serious disadvantage - often times located only a few streets over...

  • Categorical data as d3 nodes

    Recently, I’ve been messing around with different ways to display categorical data. I do a fair bit of work with categorical data, and in my presentations and reports I was getting a bit sick of bar charts and tables (and pie charts are out). A nice solution is the use...

  • My Voice - Initial findings from the WLZ Survey

    An external blog detailing the intial findings from the West London Zone ‘My Voice’ Survey.