CO-Data

CO-Data started out as a website I developed to graph the data from this site. I wrote it in Python and use the Bokeh library to produce the charts. I never got it past the initial proof-of-concept phase, and it only displayed data for the Art section of this site. Furthermore, I lost interest in it because the charts became finicky once browsers started to include heightened privacy and security defaults (no third-party cookies, HTTPS as default Etc.). I could have integrated the Bokeh stuff into the site to alleviate some of the problems but I never got around to that. It was, also, slow which forced me to develop Skivvy (no longer active).

I should add here I re-wrote this (craigoates.net) website and used a different database and schema after starting CO-Data and Skivvy. This meant I needed to update the code for both of those projects and I never found the motivation to do so. Because of this, they kinda lingered and their digital-bits were left to rot.

With all that out of the way, I can now say I've repurposed CO-Data as a literate-programming project. It still focuses exploring this site's data, it's just without the website part. The project now uses org-mode and Common Lisp. Both are heavily tied to Emacs but you can use other programs -- like Visual Studio Code with its Alive plug-in -- if you prefer something else.

At the time of writing (December 2023), I'm using this project as a way to compare Common Lisp and Python for data science (using the term very loosely here) whilst using org-mode and Emacs. If I'm able to get the data out with Common Lisp, you will find this project will continue using Common Lisp. If you've read this and the code is in Python, that means I couldn't get Common Lisp to do what I needed, and I've not updated this page to reflect that.

Over time, I would like to do annual reviews and see how the trends in my output changes, over said time. It's not quite the live update of the project's previous guise. Having said that, it does make interacting with the data more purposeful (for me at least).

One last thing, I've included a clean version of this site's database in the CO-Data Git repository. I exported the data as a CSV file so feel free to explore the data yourself. With the data sitting in a CSV file, you can open it in Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice if that's more your thing.