This is for a workshop with students on Saturday. It’s a revision of a thing Jeff and I did a way back in 2018. I think I’ve come up with some improved examples and I’ve revised a few things. The goal is to let any skill level start to see how spreadsheets can be useful […]
Tag: Data
Gravity Forms to Graph Interaction

I’ve long wanted to build more interactive digital content after being inspired by Brett Victor’s explorable explanations. I’m now finally coming to the place where my ability to build things is starting to match my desire to create them. This particular piece of interactive content was inspired by the NYT’s You Draw It Obama article. […]
For Want of an API . . .
We wanted to be able to know whether people signing up for Ram Pages were faculty or not but didn’t want to add fields for them to fill out. VCU has an online phonebook with faculty emails in it but there didn’t appear to be a way to hook into an API. But you can […]
Code as Poetry, Time as a Variable – Options in the Ether

Backstory Driving into work I was listening to NPR and they were interviewing Nikki Giovani a poet from Virginia Tech. In high school I was one of those people who really suffered reading the The Red Wheelbarrow and other non-rhyming poems. They irritated me in the same way people seem to be annoyed by White […]
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Rampages Numbers
In responding to some data requests, I delved into the WP tables to pull some rampages data. All users ever . . . I need to set up something more automated but for this I dumped the MySQL tables as CSVs and then just imported them to Google Sheets. With very minimal functions, I got […]
Rethinking Our Project Page (and other stuff)

Image from page 211 of “Bulletin” (1961-1962) flickr photo by Internet Archive Book Images shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) I’ve been lucky enough to hire two awesome people who have started over the last month or so.1 We’re also going to get a new supervisor on July 3rd. That’s led me to have […]
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Trump Dump Data & Playing with TAGS

Image from page 60 of “Children’s ballads from history and folklore” (1886) flickr photo by Internet Archive Book Images shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) Driven mad by curiousity after this Matthew Baldwin tweet, I built this little thing. It uses the amazing Martin Hawksey’s TAGS for gathering the Tweets in Google Sheets and […]
Importing CSV into Google Sheets via Google Script

flickr photo shared by OSU Special Collections & Archives : Commons with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) As part of a future project, I’m looking for easy, automated ways to push/pull CSV files around. Initially I thought I’d just do the =importdata(‘http://theurl.com/data.csv”) function but I realized that had some drawbacks that made it less ideal […]
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Rampages Stats vs My Own Data

flickr photo shared by NASA on The Commons with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons) It’s that time of year when you try to prove to your institution that the work you do matters . . . and I am prepared to make it rain datums.1 I’m not sure how valuable this will be to others […]
Scraping with Google Spreadsheets Across Instagram, Flickr, YouTube etc.

I remain kind of amazed with how many little tricks can be done with Google Sheets. After seeing Alan’s post today, I wonder how much of the data I could pull (assuming we had the right user names and knew the services . . . really the harder part) just using Google Sheets. Turns out […]
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