ONS Local has been established by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to promote evidence-based decision-making at the local level. We aim to host insightful workshops which will provide practical, technical support to help users make the most of ONS and cross government data. Dr. Dan Olner is a Y-PERN policy fellow and spatial economic data nerd based in the School of Management at Sheffield University. Over the past two years, Dan has been working with the South Yorkshire Combined Mayoral Authority and other Yorkshire organisations to develop regional economic analysis tools.
In this session, we'll work through some examples of using R to extract data directly from web sources (like NOMIS and online Excel sheets) and create pipelines through to final outputs. Automating as many of the steps as possible can be a huge help for quickly replicating and sharing analysis, and updating quickly when new data is published (though we'll also discuss how to deal with inevitable format changes). Common ONS economic datasets will be used. Some familiarity with R will be useful, though you should be able to run all code without. If you want a quick R primer prior to the session, see Dan's previous 'R for economic data' taster session (slides, video and R setup guide; ONS Local Workshop Using R for regional economic analysis, taster session on Vimeo).
This workshop is open to everyone, but will be particularly suited to data analysts who are responsible for creating, maintaining and developing dashboards and other data outputs for local authorities.
If you have any questions, please contact ons.local@ons.gov.uk.
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