Author: Alex Singleton

Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) is a method of spatial statistical analysis used to explore geographical differences in the effect of one or more predictor variables upon a response variable. However, as a form of local analysis, it does not scale well to (especially) large data sets because of the repeated processes of fitting and then comparing multiple regression surfaces. A solution is to make use of developing grid infrastructures, such as that provided by the National Grid Service (NGS) in the UK, treating GWR as an “embarrassing parallel” problem and building on existing software platforms to provide a bridge between an open source implementation of GWR (in R) and the grid system. To demonstrate the approach, we apply it to a case study of participation in Higher Education, using GWR to detect spatial variation in social, cultural and demographic indicators of participation.

Harris, Richard, A.D. Singleton, Daniel Grose, Chris Brunsdon, and P.A. Longley. 2010. “Grid-enabling Geographically Weighted Regression: A Case Study of Participation in Higher Education in England.” Transactions in GIS 14 (1): 43–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9671.2009.01181.x.

This is a talk given at the University of Tokyo on 5th December 2009.

Geocomputation 2009, UNSW – Sydney, 2nd Dec.

Yesterday I spoke at an OAC User Group event at the RSS about geographic visualisation and area classification more generally. The slides as usual are on slideshare!

Here is my talk from the 39th RSAI:BIS conference on 2-4 September 2009, Limerick, Ireland.

I have just finished at the RGS conference which was hosted in the fantastic city of Manchester. I thought the line up this year was very good indeed and there were lots of interesting talks. The UCL talks from CASA comprised the QMRG session I organis…

Although viewed by business and commerce as successful solutions, geodemographic profiling of neighbourhoods has attracted wide-ranging criticism in the academic literature. This paper addresses some specific concerns that arise because the derivation of classifications is rarely transparent and open to scrutiny or challenge. The substantive focus of the research reported in this paper is a nationwide geodemographic classification of how people engage with new information and communication technologies (ICTs). In response to the critique of geodemographics as a ‘black box’ technology, we describe how the classification was opened up to public scrutiny and how we conducted a major consultation exercise into the reliability of its results. We assess the message of the 50,000+ searches and 3952 responses collected during the consultation exercise, in terms of possible systematic errors in the shape and detail of the classification. Unusually for Internet-based surveys, we also investigate the likely reliability of the response information received and identify ways in which the outcome of consultation might be used to improve the classification. We believe that this is the first-ever large-scale consultation survey of the validity and remit of a geodemographic classification and that it may have wider implications for the creation of geodemographic classifications.

Longley, P.A., and A.D. Singleton. 2009. “Classification Through Consultation: Public Views Of The Geography Of The E-Society.” International Journal of Geographical Information Science 23 (6): 737–763. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13658810701704652.

This paper explores the use of geodemographic classifications to investigate the social, economic and spatial dimensions of participation in Higher Education (HE). Education is a public service that confers very significant and tangible benefits upon receiving individuals: as such, we argue that understanding the geodemography of educational opportunity requires an application-specific classification that exploits under-used educational data sources. We develop a classification for the UK higher education sector, and apply it to the Gospel Oak area of London. We discuss the wider merits of sector specific applications of geodemographics and enumerate the advantages of bespoke classifications for applications in public service provision.

Singleton, A.D., and P.A. Longley. 2009. “Creating Open Source Geodemographics – Refining a National Classification of Census Output Areas for Applications in Higher Education.” Papers in Regional Science 88 (3): 643–666. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1435-5957.2008.00197.x.

13th April 2009, Kyoto, Ritsumeikan University

Two prizes came from the UCL camp at this years GISRUK. The previously mentioned “mashup”, and also the prize for the best young research paper by my student Adnan – titled: “Moving to real time segmentation: efficient computation of geodemographic cla…

I just presented this paper at GIS Research UK (GISRUK) in Durham sparking an interesting debate about ethics and use of transactional data. This is my first attempt at Keynote on OSX / Macbook – which after an initial failure at getting technology con…

Today was a jolly nice day with Ollie and I winning the Ordnance Survey Geospatial Mashup Challenge at GISRUK 2009. There were some really good entries and I was quite surprised with the result. One site which really impressed me was: “User Adaptive Tr…

I have just published a new working paper:

Abstract:

Computer mediated communication and the Internet has fundamentally changed how consumers and producers connect and interact across both real space, and has also opened up new opportunities in virtu…

Anybody who I have come in contact with over the past two weeks has probably been subjected to me showing them an old 1904 map of Manchester and Salford housing conditions. This has really nice cartography and is accompanied by a book featuring rich te…

Towards a Higher Education Profiler, University College London, London – 11/2/09

Measuring Segregation: Methods, tools and data, a two day workshop. University of Bristol, Bristol – 11/2/09

Everybody likes free data! The Free the Postcode project aims to collect geo-locations using GPS for every UK postcode.

This is now much simpler using an iPhone application: http://www.opengeodata.org/?p=351

Public Engagement: The London Profiler, Public Profiler and the E-Society Classification, University College London, London – 8/1/09

This review begins by acknowledging the success of geodemographics as an important area of activity in applied geography. However, it then develops a critique of the conceptual and computational underpinnings of the approach, and argues that changes in data supply and online communication have rendered current practices obsolete. It presents elements of a new perspective, entailing: changes in the specification, estimation and testing of online geodemographic systems; adoption of consultative practices from online folksonomies; automated generation of pen portraits; and

Singleton, A.D., and Paul A. Longley. 2009. “Geodemographics, Visualisation, and Social Networks in Applied Geography.” Applied Geography 29 (3): 289–298. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2008.10.006.

Good news today for OS X users is Google Earth Browser Plug-in is now available on Mac OS X:

http://code.google.com/apis/earth/

http://www.spatialkey.com/ looks a promising new GIS based start up built around geovisualisation. Of particular note are the heat map visualisation demos which link both time and place.

It appears to be built in the new Flex framework which I think w…

I am also affiliated with the QMRG and we have just finished digitising the vast majority of the CATMOG series of quantitative methods guides. These are a great resource and can be downloaded from [here]

Two things stop me from migrating to OS X, firstly SAS and secondly GIS. The former is very unlikely to be solved any time soon, however, GIS on OS X appears a growing area. Here are a list of full GIS and GIS types software I have found:

“Full” GIS

…

Always on the look out for nice visualisations I came across Wordle today. I have generated one of my research interests:

https://speakerdeck.com/alexsingleton/what-is-gis-for-the-google-generation

ESRC Research Methods, University Oxford, Oxford – 1/7/08

Nestoria (www.nestoria.co.uk) kindly requested an interview to discuss some of the activities we have been working on recently in CASA and the Department of Geography.

More after the [link].

Market Research Society Workshop – 2/11/08

Haklay, M., Singleton, A.D., Parker, C. (2008) Web Mapping 2.0: The Neogeography of the GeoWeb. Geography Compass.

Abstract:

The landscape of Internet mapping technologies has changed dramatically since 2005. New techniques are being used and new terms have been invented and entered the lexicon such as: mash-ups, crowdsourcing, neogeography and geostack. A whole range of websites and communities from the commercial Google Maps to the grassroots OpenStreetMap, and applications such as Platial, also have emerged. In their totality, these new applications represent a step change in the evolution of the area of Internet geographic applications (which some have termed the GeoWeb). The nature of this change warrants an explanation and an overview, as it has implications both for geographers and the public notion of Geography. This article provides a critical review of this newly emerging landscape, starting with an introduction to the concepts, technologies and structures that have emerged over the short period of intense innovation. It introduces the non-technical reader to them, suggests reasons for the neologism, explains the terminology, and provides a perspective on the current trends. Case studies are used to demonstrate this Web Mapping 2.0 era, and differentiate it from the previous generation of Internet mapping. Finally, the implications of these new techniques and the challenges they pose to geographic information science, geography and society at large are considered.

Haklay, M., A.D. Singleton, and C. Parker. 2008. “Web Mapping 2.0: The Neogeography of the GeoWeb.” Geography Compass 2 (6): 2011–2039. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00167.x.

TSN Masterclass, UEA,Norwich – 3/6/08

University Nottingham – Alex D Singleton – 30/10/08

I have always struggled to find a nice easy way to create cartograms. That was until I found a relatively new tool called ScapeToad (http://chorogram.choros.ch/scapetoad/). Within minutes I had generated a very appealing cartogram of London at Output …

Gibin, M., Singleton, A., Milton,R., Mateos, P., Longley, P. (2008) An Exploratory Cartographic Visualisation of London through the Google Maps API. Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy. 1(2), 85-97.

Abstract:

This paper begins by reviewing the ways i…