New Visualisations Catching Up!

One of the maps that I liberated from the great LSE clearout sometime ago was this visually pleasing and well balanced representation of the ratio of Females to Males from the 1961 Census.

This kind of map has a specific story to tell, announcing that for a long time the women and men in the country have been unevenly distributed, placing emphasis on the demand for different types of labour. The dissaggregation by age and sex also demonstrates that in 1961 more boys are born than girls, but that more men die from occupational hazards resulting in a gender balance during adolescence and a surplus of women in old age.

Using Oliver O’Brien and Pablo Mateos’ superb Census Profiler it is possible to recreate this map using data from the most recent census.

Admittedly this map doesn’t allow you to map rates yet, although a percentage is fundamentally doing a similar job, but it really demonstrates the emerging power of online tools for creating sophisticated visualisations and analysis. What is more, the web-basis for this means that many users have access to this functionality so it reaches more people than the basic paper map, further the adaptable colour scheme and classes allow tailoring to your needs, and the multiple themes allow comparison with other data sets.

Where the paper map succeeds is in the expertise that created it, and the ability for the map to be annotated, this allows for an expert narrative to describe and explain the visualisation. The web map leaves this narrative up for discussion which is both good and bad – those who need help with interpretation don’t get it, but equally the reader is not constrained simply to the given interpretation.

It doesn’t seem like a great leap for the 2011 census to have an web-based geovisualisation site which could do these additional aspects, such as rates, perhaps wiki-based annotations by users and even create output graphs from the datatables such as the 1961 map has for age and sex. Nonetheless, it seems incredible to demonstrate this progression from paper to the web over time using this simple example.