HEFCE HE Grant Allocations 2009-10 Visualised

In our weekly team meeting, I mentioned that I’d created some visualisations of the RAE research funding allocations. I also mentioned that Tony Hirst had previously done the same for the HEFCE teaching funding allocations. I offered to send everyone links to these, but before do so, I thought I’d have a go at re-creating the HEFCE visualisations myself to get a bit more practice in with IBM’s Many Eyes Wikified. So this is a companion piece to my previous post. All credit to Tony for opening my eyes to this stuff.

So, HEFCE have announced the 2009/10 grant allocations for UK Higher and Further Education institutions and provided full spreadsheets of the figures. I’ve imported the data into Google Spreadsheets and made the three tables publicly accessible as CSV files (1), (2), (3). Note that I’ve stripped out all data relating to FE grant allocations, which is included in the original spreadsheets.

Next, I’ve imported the CSV files into IBM’s Many Eyes Wikified (1), (2), (3), and these wikified tables are now the data sources for the following visualisations.

Recurrent grant for academic year 2009-10

The Pie

Pie Chart of HEFCE Funding

Bar Chart

HEFCE Funding Bar Chart

Matrix

HEFCE Funding Matrix

Bubble Chart

HEFCE Funding Bubble Chart

Comparison with 2008-09 academic year recurrent grant

The Pie

HEFCE Recurrent Funding Pie ChartBar Chart

HEFCE Recurrent Funding Bar ChartMatrix

HEFCE Recurrent Funding MatrixBubble

HEFCE Recurrent Funding Bubble ChartNon-recurrent funding for 2009-10

The Pie

HEFCE Non-recurrent Funding Pie Chart

Bar Chart

HEFCE Non-recurrent Funding Bar Chart

Matrix

HEFCE Non-recurrent Funding Matrix

Bubble ChartHEFCE Non-recurrent Funding

RAE: UK research funding results visualised

Yesterday, the results of the funding allocation for research in UK Higher Education were announced and published on the Times Higher Education website.

Successive RAEs have concentrated research cash in the hands of the elite. This time around, the pie has been shared more widely.

The full spreadsheet of results being available, I thought this was a good opportunity for someone to visualise the data, so I published the data on Google Docs as a CSV file, which Tony Hirst fed into IBM’s Many Eyes wiki and now we can really see how the pie has been shared. Click on the images to view the interactive visualisations.

A pie…

RAE Funding Pie
Funding allocation by university group

Some bubbles…

FTE staff submitted to RAE by institution and coloured by group
FTE staff submitted to RAE by institution and coloured by group

A bar chart…

% change in total recurrent research funding
% change in total recurrent research funding by group

and a matrix…

Cash change in funding by institution and group
Cash change in funding by institution and group

You can read about the University of Lincoln’s 628% increase in funding, here and here.

Microformats and Firefox

When I have time, I like to read about new and developing web standards and specifications. Sad, you might think, but it’s a way of learning about some of the theoretical developments that eventually turn into practical functionality for all users of the Internet.  Also, I am an Archivist (film, audiovisual, multimedia) by trade, and am somewhat reassured by the development of standards and specifications as a way of achieving consensus among peers and avoiding wasted time and effort in managing ‘stuff’.

So, while poking around on Wikipedia last night, I came across ‘Operator‘, an add-on for Firefox that makes part of the ‘hidden’ semantic web immediately visible and useful to everybody. If you’re using Firefox, click here to install it. It’s been available for over a year now and is mature and extensible through the use of user scripts.  It’s been developed by Michael Kaply, who works on web browsers for IBM and is responsible for microformat support in Firefox.

Operator leverages microformats and other semantic data that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services.

In practice, Operator is a Firefox tool bar (and/or location/status bar icon) that identifies microformats and other semantic data in a web page and allows you to combine the value of that information with other web services such as search, bookmarking, mapping, etc. For example, this blog has tags. Operator identifies the tags and then offers the option of searching various services such as Amazon, YouTube, delicious and Upcoming, for a particular tag.  If Operator finds geo-data, it offers the option of mapping that to Google Maps and, on this page for example, it identifies me as author and allows you to download my contact details, which are embedded in the XHTML. Because it is extensible through user-scripts, there are many other ways that the microformat data can be used.

Of particular interest to students and staff are perhaps the microformat specifications for resumes and contact details. Potentially, a website, properly marked up (and WordPress allows for some of this already), could provide a rich and useful portfolio of their work and experience which is semantically linked to other services such as Institutional Repositories or other publications databases where their work is held.

After using it for a few hours, I now find myself disappointed when a website doesn’t offer at least one piece of semantic data that is found by Operator (currently, most don’t but some do). Microformat support will be included (rather than an add-on) in Firefox 3.1 and IE 8, so we can expect to see much more widespread adoption of it. A good thing.

There’s a nice demonstration of microformats here, using the Operator plugin.