Dr James Ashford

Research Associate, Network Analysis, Social Media and Programming


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...

Notes on Crawling Instances on the Known Fediverse

One of my favourite features of Fediverse is how different instances (whether it be Mastodon, Lemmy or Pixelfed) cooperate with each other over using the ActivityPub protocol. This is a fundamental...

Visualising Paper Co-Author Collaboration Networks

As part of my job as an academic, a large part of what I do involves producing new knowledge by publishing research papers with other fellow researchers,

As I was completing a PhD, I had the...

Analysing the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup with Graph Theory

It’s fair to say that I don’t follow many sports. I’m more of a casual observer myself and would much rather watch something like the Tour de France or a rugby match now and then....

How to Stream from the Mastodon API via HTTP in Python

As I’ve mentioned in many of my blog posts before this one, Mastodon has a publicly available API which can be used to scrape statuses, collect hashtags and much more.

One feature that...