Leeds Data Thing is a new group started in Leeds (not to be confused with Leeds Ruby Thing!).
I spoke at the first event (read the write up from Rebecca) about Geospatial visualisations and OpenStreetMap: Here are the slides:
Since then there has been a few other events as part of Big Data Week – including a load of great short talks.
This weekend there was a data hackday at the UK’s NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care in the centre of Leeds.
There’s a wealth of data on their website , but it was given to us as a mysql database, and we were able to enter remotely. On the first day I poked around the data and had a thought.
Hackdays
I often spend the first part of any hackday wondering what to do, and twiddling thumbs. I find that hackdays become for me a type of busman’s holiday – and this hackday was particularly geographical in nature. Most of the entries had some kind of data on map component. I think that these types of analyses, whilst being very smart and interesting – and may be exactly what the judges are looking for, may not exactly stretch the unexpected or “the hack” in the data.
Fortunately there was plenty of latitude for exploring things laterally. The most interesting dataset was listing the chemicals and drugs each practice spent money on – but I couldn’t find much to do with it. What caught my eye was the dataset listing the names of the doctors surgeries, practices, medical centres. If I think about my neighbourhood I can pass about half a dozen doctors in a very small area. Leeds is well covered (or perhaps just my area is!) . I was reminded of James Joyce’s quote about being unable to cross Dublin without passing a pub. Perhaps the same can be said for Leeds and doctors! The names of the surgeries were also interesting. Names such as:
Chapeloak SurgeryThe Avenue SurgeryDr Ca Hicks’ PracticeThe Dekeyser Group Practice
The Highfield Medical Centre
Chapeltown Family Surgery
Wonder if the more “leafy” the name, the more “leafy” the neighbourhood it was in? Perhaps the more grandiose sounding practices had more patients? Perhaps the smaller sounding ones had better patient satisfaction reviews?
At the venue, it appeared that I was the only one to be using Linux on the desktop and so the wifi did not work – so I had a bit over one hour to put something together. Decided to go with the concept of “Leeds is covered” and wanted something showing the labels of the practices over the areas where they were. Filling out the map, so to speak. The hack was called “Tim’s One Hour Data Challenge” and here is the end result:
thinkwhere 