Tag Archives: KNIME

TweetKollidR – A Knime workflow for creating text-rich visualisations of Twitter data

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Several weeks ago, I posted an analysis of tweets about the restrictions imposed on Melbourne residents in an effort to control an outbreak of Covid-19. That analysis was essentially a road-test of a Knime workflow that I had been piecing together for some time, but that was not quite ready to share. Since writing that post, I have revised and tidied up the workflow so that anyone can use it, and I have made it available on the Knime Hub.

In the present post, I provide a thorough description of the workflow, which I have named the TweetKollidR, and demonstrate its use through a case study of yet another dataset of tweets about Melbourne’s lockdown (which, as I write this, still has not ended, although it has been eased). 1

Continue reading TweetKollidR – A Knime workflow for creating text-rich visualisations of Twitter data →

Notes:

  1. As you will see from the search queries in Figure 3, this dataset includes some keywords that relate to Victoria more generally, rather than just Melbourne. However, since most of the content concerns the Melbourne lockdown, I will continue to refer to it as such. ↩

Tweeps in lockdown: how to see what’s happening on Twitter

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What we talk about when we talk about the lockdown

Back in January, I wrote a lengthy, data-driven meditation on the merits of my relocation from Brisbane to Melbourne. My concern at that time was the changing climate. Australia had been torched and scarred by months of bushfires, and I was feeling pretty good about escaping Brisbane’s worsening heat for Melbourne’s occasionally manic but mostly mild climatic regime.

But by gosh do I wish I was back in Brisbane now, and not just because Melbourne’s winter can be dreary. While Brisbanites are currently soaking up as much of their famed sunshine as they like, whether on the beach or in the courtyard of their favourite pub, Melburnians are confined to their homes, allowed out of the house for just an hour a day. During that hour, we are unable to venture more than 5km from our homes or to come within 1.5 meters of each other, leaving little else to do but walk the deserted streets and despair at all of the shuttered bars, restaurants and stores. All in the name of containing yet another existential threat that we can’t even see.

Of course, just because we can’t see the coronavirus doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it. Indeed, one unfortunate consequence of the ‘Stage 4’ lockdown 1 that’s been in place in Melbourne since the 2nd of August is that there is little else to talk about. We distract ourselves from talking about how bad things are by talking instead about how things got so bad in the first place. On days when our tireless premier (who at the time of writing has delivered a press conference every day for 50 days running) announces a fall in case numbers, we dare to talk about when things might not be so bad any more.

Fifty days and counting. Image from ABC News.

This post is anything but an attempt to escape this orbit of endless Covid-talk. Quite the opposite. In this post, I’m not just going to talk about the lockdown. I’m going to talk about what we talk about when we talk about the lockdown. Continue reading Tweeps in lockdown: how to see what’s happening on Twitter →

Notes:

  1. To date, we’ve been from Stage 3 back to Stage 2, and then up again to Stage 3 before ratcheting up to Stage 4. Hopefully we’ll be back to Stage 3 in a few weeks. We keep using that word, but I don’t think it means what we think it means. If I lapse into calling it ‘Level 4’ instead, that’s why. ↩

HeatTraKR – A Knime workflow for exploring Australian climate data

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Recently, I decided to crunch some data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (which I’ll just call BoM) to assess some of my own perceptions about how the climate in my home city of Brisbane had changed throughout my lifetime. As always, I performed the analysis in Knime, a free and open software platform that allows you to do highly sophisticated and repeatable data analyses without having to learn how to code. Along the way, I also took the opportunity to sharpen my skills at using R as a platform for making data visualisations, which is something that Knime doesn’t do quite as well.

The result of this process is HeatTraKR, a Knime workflow for analysing and visualising climate data from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, principally the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) dataset, which has been developed specifically to monitor climate variability and change in Australia. The workflow uses Knime’s native functionality to download, prepare and manipulate the data, but calls upon R to create the visual outputs. (The workflow does allow you to create the plots with Knime’s native nodes, but they are not as nice as the R versions.)

I’ve already used the HeatTraKR to produce this post about how the climate in Brisbane and Melbourne (my new home city) is changing. But the workflow has some capabilities that are not showcased in that post, and I will take the opportunity to demonstrate these a little later in the present post.

Below I explain how to install and use the HeatTraKR, and take a closer look at some of its  outputs that I have not already discussed in my other post. Continue reading HeatTraKR – A Knime workflow for exploring Australian climate data →

Confessions of a climate deserter

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For so long, climate change has been discussed in Australia (and indeed elsewhere) as if it were an abstract concept, a threat that looms somewhere in the future. Not anymore. In 2019, climate change became a living nightmare from which Australia may never awake.

While I prepared this post in the dying weeks of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, there was not a day when some part of the country was not on fire. As at 24 January, more than 7.7 million hectares — that’s an area about the size of the Czech Republic — have burned. Thirty-three people have died. Towns have been destroyed. Old-growth forests have burned. Around a billion animals have been killed. Whole species have probably been lost.

The effects were not only felt in the bush. Capital cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra endured scorching temperatures while choking in smoke. Newspaper front pages (except those of the Murdoch press) became a constant variation on the theme of red. The country entered a state of collective trauma, as if at war with an unseen and invincible enemy.

The connection between the bushfires and climate change has been accepted by nearly everyone, with the notable exception of certain denialists who happen to be running the country — and even they are starting to change their tune (albeit to one of ‘adaptation and resilience’). One thing that is undeniable is that 2019 was both the hottest and driest year Australia has experienced since records began, and by no small margin. In December, the record for the country’s hottest day was smashed twice in a single week. And this year was not an aberration. Eight of the ten hottest years on record occurred in the last 10 years.  Environmentally, politically, and culturally, the country is in uncharted territory.

Climate deserters

I watched this nightmare unfold from my newly adopted city of Melbourne, to which I moved from Brisbane with my then-fiancée-now-wife in January 2019. As far as I can tell, Melbourne has been one of the better places in the country to have been in the past few months. The summer here has been pleasantly mild so far, save for a few horrific days when northerly winds baked the city and flames lapped at the northern suburbs. It seems that relief from the heat is never far away in Melbourne: the cool change always comes, tonight or tomorrow if not this afternoon. During the final week of 2019, as other parts of Victoria remained an inferno, Melbourne reverted to temperatures in the low 20s. We even got some rain. It was almost embarrassing.

Finding relief from the heat is one of the reasons my wife and I moved to Melbourne. Having lived in Brisbane all of our lives, we were used to its subtropical summers, but the last few pushed us over the edge. To be sure, Brisbane rarely sees extreme heat. In summer, the maximums hover around 30 degrees, and rarely get beyond the mid-30s. But as Brisbanites are fond of saying (especially to southerners ), it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity that gets you. The temperature doesn’t have to be much about 30 degrees in Brisbane before comfort levels become thoroughly unreasonable. Continue reading Confessions of a climate deserter →