Dashboard week – DAY TWO

by Charlie Scammell

Today we are looking data from the Parliamentary Rules Database, which contains ‘the formal rules of procedure’ for parliaments over time.

I began the day by web scraping the data from parlrulesdata.org. First off by getting a list of the dates used in each link to the next page for that specific year.

I then filtered each of these date s into the joining pages URL and downloaded each individual table from each page and used a combination of regex and split-to-column to pull out the desired rows.

It’s not the most organised workflow but it done the job.

Once I had the raw data scraped from the website I didn’t really know how to go about building a dashboard out of it, I began toying with the idea of joining different data sets to give some form of direction to my analysis, such as Political parties in power over the years, or key dates in the history of parliament.

…That didn’t go to plan, I began by using prep to join the dates of each prime minister’s and political parties date of election then I combined the data. However, this began to look a little similar to others around me, so I went back to the drawing board.

I decided to use simple parameters to allow the user to select a desired date to return the laws set on that date. I feel I may have stripped down my dashboard a little too much and currently planning on using the remainder of the day to hopefully pull out some last-minute analysis.

Its not great but I applied a time line of the last decade to see if there was any correlation to a new Prime minister taking office and seeing any change in the number of laws passed in the following months.

Overall today, at the beginning of the day, using Alteryx to scrape the data, I found interesting and enjoyable but then hit a wall when trying to visualize such limited data. I feel my time management was better than yesterday and look forward to a new challenge tomorrow.

Completed Dashboard:

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Charlie Scammell

Thu 24 Oct 2019

Wed 23 Oct 2019

Mon 21 Oct 2019