Dr James Ashford

Research Associate, Network Analysis, Social Media and Programming


Honest Review of ThinkPad X240

I’m a huge Apple fanboy. There is very little you can do to persuade me to use another device for my daily and work driver. I love how all my Apple devices work seamlessly together under the...

Solving Word Ladders With Graph Theory

If you read the newspapers like me (yes, people still do that), you may have come across a “word ladder” in the puzzle section. It’s a simple little game where you are given two w...

Announcing My First Open Source Project: Graphkit

Before the Christmas break, I was working on my own little side project for working with graphs as part of a wider exercise to learn the Go programming language. And so, after a few months of hard...

Mastering the Bluesky Firehose with Python: A Simple Tutorial

Bluesky is awesome for many reasons, however one feature which not many may know about is the ability to collect data using the publicly available API thanks to the AT protocol - the system used to...

Finding Peaks in a Dataset and Why It Is Not Straightforward

In my job as a data analyst, I come across many different types of problems to solve. Some are relatively easy to solve, others not so much. That was until recently, where I came across a problem I...