My latest hacky hobby project relates to my editorial work at Social Movement Studies. I’ve been exploring other ways of presenting the excellent content we publish in the journal, and trying to give a sense of the over coherence of the journal’s development. My initial attempts in this direction are presented in an infographic reviewing SMS 2017 content. (Now updated for a review of 2018.) Lessons learned from this exercise:

• The Scopus database is a good source for downloadable data. I found the API rather complex though (especially given licensing issues for different datasets), so haven’t ventured into making a more dynamic website for this.
• The Google Maps javascript API really does make it rather straightforward to present custom markers on a map. I found it useful to borrow this Overlapping Marker Spidifier to deal with multiple markers on single locations.
• Jason Davies’ word cloud generator does a marvellous job of layout, although I ended up recoding the resulting svg by hand to make it interactive.