Our Stargazing Oxford mini-lectures are online for all to see

During our Stargazing Oxford event on January 12th we had three sets of mini-lectures. These are short, concise talks about astrophysics that anyone should get something out of. There’s galaxies, planets, cosmology and more. I’ll be blogging links to some of these in the next few days. You can find the current set of talks […]

Unproceedings of .Astronomy 4

We’re very pleased to present the Unproceedings of the Fourth .Astronomy Conference (.Astronomy 4), which was held in Heidelberg, Germany, July 9-11 2012. The goal of the .Astronomy conference series is to bring together astronomers, educators, developers and others interested in using the Internet as a medium for astronomy. Unproceedings of .Astronomy 4

Stargazing Oxford is Today!

Join us at the Physics Department on Keble Road, near St. Giles in Oxford. From 2-10pm we’ll be manning stands, doing craft activities and answering questions. We’ll also be doing some remote observing throughout that time and there will be a planetarium continuously in operation too. In our auditorium there are mini lectures (in groups […]

The Andromeda Project

Last week we launched a brand new Zooniverse site: The Andromeda Project. We’re asking people to spot star clusters in the Andromeda galaxy in data from the Hubble Space Telescope. You might think it sounds like menial work but it’s strangely addictive – and incredibly useful for the researchers behind the data. This project joins […]

Visualising Collaboration in Astronomy

Over on this link, you’ll find a data-driven document (D3 FTW!) showing collaboration between the most authorship-intensive institutions in astronomy. The document is a chord diagram showing the strength of collaboration between research centres, based on co-authorship of papers. I’ve included some screenshots here to give you the idea – the one above is for worldwide institutions […]

Mapping Collaboration in Astronomy

A couple of weeks ago I began to geocode the database of astronomical research I scraped from NASA ADS during .Astronomy 4. This database consists of all the published astronomical research in five major journals (almost 250,000 papers going back decades, from MNRAS, ApJ, AJ, A&A and PASP) up to July 2012. You can read […]

Geocoding the Literature

I (or rather my computer) spent most of this morning geocoding the database of astronomical papers that I scraped from NASA ADS a while back. I’ve got about a quarter of a million papers, covering several of the major astronomical journals (MNRAS, ApJ, A&A, PASP and AJ) back to their first publications. There are 7 […]

More Astronomy Data Mining: It’s Word-Matrix Time!

I have been exploring the terms used in the astronomical literature (see previous post), and have turned my attention to terms that seem to correlate with each other in astronomy publications. I thought it would at least be interesting to see how often one word is mention alongside another. To do this I take terms […]

Mining the Astronomical Literature

At .Astronomy 4 in Heidelberg, I began hacking on some natural language processing of the astronomical literature as part of my Hack Day project with Sarah Kendrew and Karen Masters. It began as a version of BrainScanr for astronomy – which it can still become – however it also provides an interesting database to explore, […]

.Astronomy 4

In 2008, in the midst of my PhD, I ran a conference called .Astronomy. The idea was to bring together all the other astronomers who were into the web and networks. It might not seem very long ago, but 2008 was before Twitter went mainstream and before everyone’s gran was on Facebook – to use […]