Filtering Guardian University Data Every Which Way You Can…

In a post from way back when – Does Funding Equal Happiness in Higher Education? – that I still get daily traffic to, though the IBM Many Eyes Wikified hack described in it no longer works, I aggregated and reused a selection of data sets collected by the Guardian datastore relating to HE.

Whilst the range of datasets used in that hack don’t seem to have been re-collected more recently, the Guardian DataStore does still publish and annual set of aggregated data (from Unistats?) for courses by subject area across UK HE (University guide 2013 – data tables).

The DataStore data is published using Google spreadsheets, which as regular readers will know also double up as a database. The Google Visualisation API that’s supported by Google Spreadsheets also makes it easy to pull data from the spreadsheets into an interactive dashboard view.

As an example, I’ve popped a quick demo up as a Scraperwiki View showing how to pull data from a selected sheet within the Guardian University data spreadsheet and filter it using a range of controls. I’ve also added a tabular view, and a handful of scatterplots, to show off the filtered data.

To play with the view, visit here: Guardian Student Rankings.

If you want to hack around with the view, it’s wikified here: wikified source code.

PS I’ve also pulled all the subject data tables into a single Scraperwiki database: Guardian HE Data 2013