haz (Christian Muise)

vincpatruno

vincpatruno (vincpatruno)

Good question! The main reason is because there are males (or females) resident abroad.

haz

haz (Christian Muise)

PhD Computer Science student at the University of Toronto.

Ahh, interesting. Any plans to put in some visualizations?

arcald

arcald (arcald)

On the look for quirky stories within datasets.

Hello Haz!
That would definitely be interesting and i will see what i can do about it.

In terms of data sources, data are available in digital format from the [greek ministry of internal afairs](http://ekloges.ypes.gr/) but only since 1996. It would be worth going "the extra mile" and trying to locate detailed data from an objective and reliable source at least post-1974 (i.e. after the dictatorship). However, i am not sure how much "interesting" would that be "in-context" because since 1974 it has basically been a socialist (centre) government with brief lapses of conservative (right) governments while the Communist party (left...obviously! :-D ) has steadily been receiving more or less the same percentage of votes (These are the three main parties). What would look really interesting in a visualisation like this....is just coming up this Sunday! (06/05/2012) :-D Elections are up, amidst a rather fragmented political landscape and everything is pretty much open.

haz

haz (Christian Muise)

PhD Computer Science student at the University of Toronto.

Aye, the result of the upcoming election may not work in any historical context here...Will there be lots of good data coming from the election?

arcald

arcald (arcald)

On the look for quirky stories within datasets.

Oh yes, the data produced by the election process are interesting but i doubt they will be availabe in a usable format :-/ . For example, you can see a snapshot here (http://ekloges-prev.singularlogic.eu/v2009/pages/index.html). Clicking on a county takes you to that county's results and you basicaly get a breakdown of how many were supposed to vote, how many actually did (that's a very interesting statistic) and then, of those who did, how many voted for each party. Unfortunately, there is no option to download these data in any format :-/
Essentially, Blue is the conservatives (right wing), Green is the socialists (centre, centre-left) and Red is the left wing. The first two parties (the right wing and centre) usually receive approximately 80% (+-7 approximately) of the votes...that's the kind of ping-pong that has been going on since 1974 :-) (Green, Green, Blue, Green, Green, Green, Blue and so on)

haz

haz (Christian Muise)

PhD Computer Science student at the University of Toronto.

The data could likely be scraped pretty well by the looks of it (scraperwiki for example is set up to do this sort of work). This may be of interest:
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2012/may/06/greece-elections-results-map

arcald

arcald (arcald)

On the look for quirky stories within datasets.

Thank you very much haz. The graphics.gr company was the one employed by a major greek TV station to do the graphics all day yesterday, so good thing the Guardian chose to embed their work in that article. Regarding scraping, yes that would be possible although not as straightforward as a simple "link to raw data" which could be offered readily at least on the next day of the elections. I am not sure that 'typical' web scrapers would work in this case, because the website that i link to above, is the entry point to an application that handles all the querying and displaying. Therefore, you would need a complete "browser" scrapper that would return the DOM rather than the "document" and after that you would be up for a lot of TABLEs parsing (especially for pulling out the data per each electoral region). :-/

haz

haz (Christian Muise)

PhD Computer Science student at the University of Toronto.

Ya, I hate it when sites do that -- if there was just a proper url for each of the links (or one big page with all the data), then it would be easy to parse.