5 July 2014 - Some websites offer data that you can download as an Excel or CSV file (e.g., Eurostat), or they may offer structured data in the form of an API. Other websites contain useful information, but they don’t provide that information in a convenient form. In such cases, a webscraper may be the tool to extract that information and store it in a format that you can use for further analysis.

29 December 2013 - It took me a while to figure out how to create a map with Qgis and data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Here’s how I did it.

26 September 2013 - The reason I wrote the script has to to with this article on how the performance of women professional road cyclists is improving. I wanted to check whether a similar trend is going on among amateur riders, more specifically, participants in the Gerrie Knetemann Classic (incidentally, the script would take Knetemann for a woman – it’s not foolproof). The results of the ride are available online, but pre-2012 editions lack information on the gender of participants. So that’s what the script was for.

9 September 2013 - Say, you have a list of addresses and you want to know which neighbourhood they’re in. It turns out this is actually quite easy if you use the free & open source mapping tool Qgis and you have a shapefile of the neighbourhoods. Here’s how it works: