data – Slugger O'Toole

Northern Ireland at 100: Unionism failing; Nationalism stuck; Moderates thriving…

Philip McGuinness on April 27, 2021, 8:00 am | Readers 4060

One hundred years after Partition, Northern Ireland is still in existence. It would surely come as a big surprise to many who thronged the streets of Belfast on June 22nd 1921 – the date King George V opened the first NI Parliament in City Hall – that unionism is now a minority in Stormont. It would also surely come as a big surprise to many nationalists in 1972 that the state set up to guarantee unionist rule in north-east Ireland …

NI PoliGraph, a new site for NI politics data…

David Mulholland on January 8, 2021, 7:50 am | Readers 1310

NI PoliGraph is a new site created to provide ongoing data-driven analysis of Northern Irish politics. The site tracks data from multiple sources – Twitter, news outlets, the Assembly, and opinion polls – for the NI political parties, and our MLAs and MPs. What the site contains Twitter is used to some degree by the majority of MLAs and MPs, and although there is a considerable amount of ‘noise’ in the content of what members post or retweet, we can nevertheless …

If 2008 was a win for social 2012 was a win for biggish data (and political numeracy)…

Mick Fealty on November 7, 2012, 10:01 am | Readers 42

There’s probably more US stories out there than any of us can process, so I’m planning to ‘dump’ judicially. Wired on the big non political winner of this US election, Nate Silver’s rigorous modelling techniques (which perhaps resulted in a great deal less bellicosity in US news rooms): Data was also the story of how this election was analyzed. Obama won the election. But Nate Silver ofThe New York Times completely reshaped its coverage. Silver steadied the nerves of liberals and rattled …

Information needs political advocates to make it free…

Mick Fealty on July 5, 2012, 3:01 pm | Readers 43

We hear a lot about the great value of FOI’s. And there have been some great instances it has brought a lot of telling detail to light. But most of the time you really need to know exactly what you are looking for, often right down to the time of day the subject line, etc. More often however just heavy negotiation required to unlock the complex mechanism endows the discovered information with a heightened meaning it may not deserve in …

Poverty, deprivation, identity and voting, a desire for integration, and who funds peace building?

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on February 29, 2012, 9:32 am | Readers 178

As posted earlier, the Community Relations Council’s first Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Report was published today. It includes a handy reminder of the main moments since 1974 when ‘the hand of history’ has been on the peace process as well as an overview of the demography of Northern Ireland and a profile of its workforce. Amongst population figures, communal identity breakdown charts and graphs of productivity and living standards, one table explains that compared to the UK as a whole, …

Painting a picture of the peace process by numbers – CRC’s NI Peace Monitoring Report

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on February 29, 2012, 7:35 am | Readers 90

Almost £100m a year has been granted for peace-building in Northern Ireland and the six border counties of the Republic since 1987. The number of incidents of paramilitary violence decreased between 2010 and 2011. The PSNI clearance rate for crimes such as paramilitary assaults/punishment beatings in 2011 was only 4%. Northern Ireland has the highest percentage of adults of working age in the UK with no educational qualifications: 20%, compared with 10% of the UK as a whole. The overwhelming …

#picamp – FOI and Data

Alan Meban (Alan in Belfast) on November 20, 2010, 10:26 pm | Readers 6

There was a good discussion this morning at PI Camp around the conjoined issues of FOI and open data. The room had practitioners from both sides of the FOI fence – civil servants, journalists and bloggers. The idea for the session came out of my belief that FOI is often a crude tool that can produce more heat than light, and tends to encourage institutional obfuscation rather than a spirit of openness and sharing. So how best to use FOI …

Turnout statistics form – please complete

Blank on May 5, 2010, 11:23 pm | Readers 1

Further to Mick’s ‘call to action‘, there will be numerous threads throughout polling day for discussion on turnouts. We have created the form below to ensure we can quickly process figures and generate overviews as we go. The information will be used to assist Slugger predictions during this and future elections and inform discussions. It relies on your contributions to build a broad picture. If you are gathering turnout data please take a little time out to input it via …