About Me

I’m an academic in the UK researching Network Science and Social Computing. I enjoy scraping, analysing and visualising data and social networks. In my free time, I like to explore the outdoors, mountain climbing, cycling, running and attending church. I think of myself as an all-round nerd.

How Self-Organising Maps Work: Explained with Graphics

Artificial Neural Networks (simply known as neural networks) come in all different shapes and sizes and can be designed to solve different types of problems. Classification, regression, supervised and unsupervised. Neural networks are incredibly versatile. It’s fair to say that neural networks are the go-to solution for any predictive task imaginable. This is especially true […]

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Analysing Posts About the #Coronation on Mastodon

There is no doubt that the recent coronation of King Charles III was a massive event in the UK. Wether you’re in favour of the monarchy or not, there is no doubt that the coronation event is a big taking point. This was certainly the case on Mastodon – my preferred microblogging platform of choice. […]

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How to Build Tag Clouds From Mastodon Hashtags

Hashtags are an important part of microblogging and are used to reach a wider audience of interested people. Much like Twitter, hashtags are also widely used on Mastodon and it’s common for users to include as many hashtags as possible in their posts to maximum the audience reach. Also, as shown in a previous post, […]

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The Relationship Between Coding and My Mental Health

If there is one thing you’ll probably know about me, it is that I love writing code. I do it for my job and I do it for leisure. It’s fair to say that I’ll take any opportunity I can get to get stuck into a coding problem. If you’ve read just a few of […]

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Book Review: “The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread – and Why They Stop”

Considering the all-too-familiar with the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of contagionand something spreading from one person to the next, has been poorly understooduntil now. Adam Kucharski, a Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology atthe London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, demonstrates how COVID-19(as well as other epidemics) and viral social media content behave in aremarkably […]

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Are Static Site Generators All What They’re Hyped up to Be?

I’ve had a website for a good 10+ years or so now, and I’ve come to use a lot of web development tools in that time. This includes everything from coding in pure HTML to using CMSs such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. I’ve also come to use some static site generators on and off […]

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Linux Software I Use for Data Science Via the Terminal

In the previous post, I talked about some of the software I use every day for performing data science related tasks. In my case, the vast majority of the time I use the software to perform social network analysis (my area of expertise) as well other generic data science tasks (such as scraping and data […]

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Top 5 Software I Use For Data Science Projects Everyday

Like most data scientists and researchers, I spend most of my day in front of a computer. Most of the time, I’m either writing, reading or coding something exciting up. Over the past couple of years as a researcher / academic / data scientist, I’ve come to use a lot of software. Some fancy, others […]

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