So Google has released an invitation-based beta of their new Google Maps version for 2013, at their developer conference (I/O) last week. I’ve been trying it out over the last few days. Compare the new version above, with the old … Continue reading →
Author Archive for Oliver O`Brien
NYC’s Bikeshare is Almost Here
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Not long now – less than a month – until the 1 May launch of New York City’s long-awaited and delayed (the hurricane last year didn’t help) bikeshare system, Citi Bike. Stations are starting to be rolled out. A pilot … Continue reading →
London’s Oyster Card Tidal Flow
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Here is an animation I created a couple of years ago, one of a number I created for the “Sense and the City” exhibition at the London Transport Museum, which ran from Summer 2011 to Spring 2012. A version of … Continue reading →
This Place
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
This Place is a visualisation of 2011 Census data for England and Wales, for your local area. I’ve been meaning to adapt Michal Miguski‘s This Tract for the 2011 UK Census, ever since I saw it a couple of years … Continue reading →
The London Bike Share Marches North
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
It’s not just Wandsworth and Fulham that will be getting Barclays Cycle Hire in the next year or so when Phase 3 goes live – Hackney and Islington will be getting a few too. The iconic “Boris Bikes” will be … Continue reading →
A Map of Scotland’s Deprivation
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
About this time last year, I created a “Map of the Geodemographics of Great Britain” which included the Output Area classifications (OAC) for GB, based on the 2001 Census, and also included the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) for England, … Continue reading →
Google Doodle for London Underground’s 150th Anniversary
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Google has replaced their normal logo with a special “Doodle” for today, celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the London Underground today. The graphic is a stylised version of the iconic…
Me, Geolocated on Twitter
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I was prompted by the excellent Twitter Tongues map, where geolocated tweets in London (including mine, and those from hundreds of thousands of others) were mined by Ed Manley over the summer, and then mapped by James Cheshire, to see … Continue reading →
Paris Workshop on Bike Sharing Systems
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I attended a one-day workshop last week, hosted by IFSTTAR’s GERI Animatic research group at École des Ponts ParisTech just east of Paris. The workshop was on Bicycle Sharing Systems, and as I have recently been working with a couple … Continue reading →
A Periodic Table for London
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Here is a webpage that uses my own CityDashboard API*, to build a Periodic-Table inspired “data artwork” of live London information, as a series of coloured square panels on a website. The squares update regularly with fresh information, and throb … Continue reading →
Update to CityDashboard CSV API & iPad Wall!
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I’ve made some minor alterations to the CSV API for CityDashboard. The main changes are in the metadata rows (the top two) rather than the subsequent rows. Specifically, the top metadata row has now split out the description, source and … Continue reading →
The Electric Tube
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
In six weeks time, London will have a second orbital railway. The Circle Line has been running for just over 100 years, and on 9 December will be joined by the latest addition to Transport for London (TfL)’s Overground network … Continue reading →
Boundary Change Map
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I pulled together this interactive map of Proposed Constituency Boundary Changes in England, after the information was released by the Boundary Commission for England last week. My colleague James Cheshire highlighted that this kind of map could be illuminating, particularly … Continue reading →
Prism: A Real-life CityDashboard
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I was at the V&A earlier today to see Prism, a new installation by digital artist Keiichi Matsuda which is part of the London Design Festival. Prism uses data from UCL CASA’s CityDashboard and other London open data sources, to … Continue reading →
Behind the Scenes at the British Library Map Room
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I was lucky enough to be on a private tour of the British Library Map Room, as part of the Society of Cartographers conference at the beginning of the month. The tour showed some of the treasures of the Map … Continue reading →
Mapping London Presentation for the Society of Cartographers Conference
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I presented on the Mapping London blog, at the Society of Cartographers’ 48th Annual Conference which was at UCL this year, showing a general outline of the blogs and some maps featured on it, plus some work done by James … Continue reading →
CityDashboard Weather Forecasts – Yahoo! to the Rescue
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
After Google abruptly turned off their XML weather feed this week, I’ve switched to using Yahoo! Weather (an RSS feed) for the CityDashboard weather forecast module. Yahoo uses WOEIDs rather than city names, which takes a bit longer to configure … Continue reading →
Bike Share Operators and Social Media – User Engagement with Twitter
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Many of the bike share operators whose systems I’ve mapped have accounts on Twitter – but do they use them to reply to customers, notify of system changes, or just tweet promotional measures? Have they built up an appropriately large … Continue reading →
Velo-City Review
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I was in Vancouver at the end of June for the Velo-City conference – which is the cycling industry’s conference on bike sharing and urban cycling. The lead sponsors were PBSC who are behind the technology for many of the … Continue reading →
Olympic Venue Tweets on CityDashboard
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
There’s a new, temporary panel on the London CityDashboard which shows Twitter activity at the London 2012 venues. The panel is using data from new Twitter collector tools in the Big Data Toolkit, which being developed by my colleague Steven James Gray as part of his PhD. For each venue, the collectors count the number [...]
How to “Boris Bike” to the Olympic Park
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Yes! It is possible! There may not be any Barclays Cycle Hire docking stations in the Olympic Park itself, possibly due to “Barclays” not being the official financial services provider of the Olympics but more likely because of the logistics of rebalancing flows to/from major events and the safety aspects of a crowded space, but [...]
Olympic Venues as an Infographic Map
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Thanks to the Chairman of CASA, Prof Michael Batty, for tipping me off about this map of Olympic Venues in London, created by Katherine Baxter and Steven Potter of LondonTown….
Mike Hall’s London Boroughs
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Mike Hall, illustrator and designer, has been painstakingly creating large poster maps of each of the London boroughs, largely by hand. Each map has a different design and theme, drawing…
Six Degrees of Twitter
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
This is my Twitter social graph. Click on the graphic to see a larger version. Key The font sizes for the names correspond to the number of followers, while the colour ramp (light grey to yellow to blue) is proportional to the number of listings per follower. That is, someone who has a small number [...]
Recce
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Recce is an iPhone app which locates you on a map and shows you various POIs (points of interest) on demand such as local coffee shops. Nothing particularly new –…
Velo-City Preview
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
[Updated] I’ll be presenting at Velo-City in Vancouver later this week. Velo-City is the “world’s premier cycling planning conference”. It is likely to have a significant bike-sharing flavour – the lead sponsor being PBSC which designed the 6000-odd “Boris Bikes” (aka Barclays Cycle Hire bikes) that are a distinctive sight in central London, as well [...]
Mind the Map: A Map by Macdonald Gill
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
This is an extract of a map produced in 1928 for London Transport by Macdonald Gill. He produced many maps in this “flowery” style – a world away from the…
Jenni Sparks: Hand-Drawn Map of London
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
This wonderful map (above is just an extract) has been drawn by artist & illustrator Jenni Sparks. It’s a hand-drawn map of central and inner-city London. Tube/train lines, parks and…
CityDashboard – the API
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Here is the API documentation for CityDashboard. It’s really not a very advanced API, and it’s not delivered in a “proper” format (e.g. XML or JSON), instead it’s available as a number of CSV/TXT-formatted files. It ain’t pretty but it … Continue reading →
Mind The Map: The Land of Hopeful Commuters
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
The Mind the Map exhibition, at the London Transport Museum, doesn’t only feature historic maps, such as Beck’s “joke map” that we covered before. This extract above is a photo…
A Guide to London 1908
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
The same day that James received a historic picture map of London that we eventually dated to around 1908, mainly based on the appearance of the 1908 Olympic Stadium in…
The MySQL Groupwise Maximum Problem
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
There is a surprisingly difficult task to solve with MySQL queries, which I’ve been spending some time trying to do – the Groupwise Maximum problem. This is the name for the type of query that I was trying, although in … Continue reading →
Mind the Map: Beck’s Circuit Diagram
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
A major new exhibition on mapping the London Underground – Mind the Map – opened last week at the Transport Museum in Covent Garden. Mapping London was at the launch…
Tube Map Sticky Tape!
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Now this is just excellent – it’s a roll of tape with a custom-designed map of the London Underground (and DLR & Overground) on it. It’s produced by the Seoul-based…
NYC’s Bike Share Approaches
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
New York City last week released a preliminary map showing the proposed sites for the launch of its bike sharing scheme, now named Citi Bike (with Citigroup being the lead sponsor along with Mastercard). Citigroup’s sponsorship is crucial for the … Continue reading →
WhereCampEU 2012
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
I was at the third WhereCampEU “unconference” which took place in Amsterdam over the last weekend of April, following previous editions in London and Berlin which I was also at. The meeting was an ideal opportunity for me to feature … Continue reading →
New Olympic Park Map
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
We featured the first official Olympic Park map at the beginning of the year, and it has already received an update which now includes pictures of the major buildings and…
Modal Council Tax Bands in England
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Here’s a map of England, overlaid on it is a choropleth map showing the modal (i.e most common) council tax band within each Census Output Area (OA) in England, based on March 2011 data released by the Office of National … Continue reading →
The London Data Table
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
The London Data Table was one of my personal favourites from the exhibition accompanying the CASA “Smart Cities” conference which took place at the University of London last Friday. The concept was thought up by Steven Gray and it consists … Continue reading →
On Colour Ramps and City Dashboards
by Oliver O`Brien • • Comments Off
Here are the colour ramps I am using for numeric measures in the recently launched CityDashboard (which by the way now has a new URL – http://citydashboard.org/): The colours have been designed to be clearly distinguishable from the white text … Continue reading →