Artists and citizen scientists collective Domestic Science ran a couple of courses for other artists and interested individuals to learn more about working with data and APIs.

They wanted to help artists to better understand the possibilities and techniques used by technologists, so that they could make better art and not have to rely quite as much on the benevolence (or funding requirements) of geeks.

Adrian developed and delivered a section of the workshops, looking at how some of the simple command-line tools available on UNIX-based systems (or with UNIX-like terminal applications) can be used to wrangle data into more useful (to you) information.

He showed how you can bring the same tools to bear on seemingly disparate data types if you treat it as the lowest common denominator of plain text. You can get surprisingly far with the judicious chaining together of commands such as grep, sort and uniq.