21 October 2014
In between our regular posts on Alteryx and Tableau tips and tricks we also like to get our hands dirty with public datasets to put those tips into action for ourselves and show what is possible.Freedom of Information in the UK - an OverviewThe UK's Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation is formed of two Acts: Freedom of Information Act 2000 and Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002. It gave the private individuals, campainers, companies and journalists 'general right of access' to information held by government, councils and schools. It affects over 100,000 different public bodies and came into force in its totality on 1 January 2005.Requests can be made by a variery of means, electronic or postal, and the public body generally has 20 days to respond; usually entering into a discourse with the individual to discuss the nature and format of the output of the request. FOI requests can be turned fown if they cost more than £600 or for other reasons, such as if the information is available by other means, or if the information deals with security matters.In his memoirs Tony Blair, who as British Prime minister introduced the Act, said: 'Freedom of Information Act. Three harmless words. I look at those words as I write them, and feel like shaking my head 'til it drops off. You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There is really no description of stupidity, no matter how vivid, that is adequate. I quake at the imbecility of it.'WhatDoTheyKnow.comThe website WhatDoTheyKnow.com acts as an integrated service for making and archiving FOI requests. It is has over 30,000 registered users and 15%-20% of the FOI requests made to UK Central Government are made through the site. The site is run by registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy (UKCOD) as part of its mySociety project.About this Data VisualisationThis data visualisation explores the requests made through the WhatDoTheyKnow.com, it ranks the top 200 words used in the titles of FOI requests over this period and plots their ranks that month vs each other (so the most popular word each month would get a ranking of 1, the least popular 200). It shows all the words in a small multiple / trellis format to allow comparisons to be made across the charts - assumptions could be made about why certain words are more popular at certain times, though this is left to the reader.How the data was obtainedThe data used in this visualisation was obtained by looking at requests made on the WhatDoTheyKnow.com website using a webscraping tool Import IO (www.importio.com) in combination with the data manipulation and Analytics tool Alteryx (www.alteryx.com). The visualisation is built in Tableau (www.tableausoftware.com).The data extracted shows the requests made from 2008 through to present day. Some analysis was done in Alteryx to separate out the words and remove plurals and common words.Click on the image below to open the visualisation. Any comments on Twitter (@ChrisLuv) or in the comments below always appreciated.