James Ashford

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James Ashford

I’m an academic in the UK researching Network Science and Social Computing.

Analysing the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup with Graph Theory

Analysing the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup with Graph Theory

It's fair to say that I don't follow many sports. I'm more of a casual observer myself and would much rather watch something like the Tour de France or a rugby match now and then. That being said, I recently came across a post on my Mastodon feed about using

How to Stream from the Mastodon API via HTTP in Python

How to Stream from the Mastodon API via HTTP in Python

As I've mentioned in many of my blog posts before this one, Mastodon has a publicly available API which can be used to scrape statuses, collect hashtags and much more. One feature that I have yet to mention in this blog is the ability to stream statuses as Mastodon features

Why I'm moving to Ghost from WordPress

For those of you that have kept a beady eye on this site over the past few days, may have noticed a few changes around here. To cut a long story, the Raspberry Pi that I use to run my WordPress site ran out of space, and it took me

Your Social Network Is Bigger Than You Think!

Your Social Network Is Bigger Than You Think!

Your social network is bigger than you think! I remember what got me really interested in social network analysis as a field of academic study was just the scale at which these networks grow. Whether we are looking at how people talk with others or share things with other people,

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How to Build a Self-Organising Map (SOM) in Python Step-by-Step

In a separate blog post, I covered the basis for understanding how self-organising maps (SOM) work. This included what a SOM is, why SOM’s are useful and how they work – including the training algorithm. In this blog post, we’ll go through how we can build a simple SOM

PhD Update: I Passed My Viva

PhD Update: I Passed My Viva

This is just a short blog post to update you on a major milestone in my career and, in my life. Last week, I successfully defend my PhD thesis. 🎉🥳 It’s a great achievement, and it’s something thing I never thought I would ever do. Having spend the past