The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Filmed in Copenhagen October 2021. I talk about the power of maps to reveal the invisible, drawing examples from history as well as Atlas of the Invisible, Where the Animals Go and London: The Information Capital.
The post Science and Cocktails:…
In 2018 Oliver Uberti and I had the honour of receiving the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography. What follows is an adaptation of our acceptance speech from the 2018 NACIS Annual Meeting in Norfolk, Virginia. To read the article in Cartographic Perspectives and for referencing information click here. IMAGINATION Oliver: Good evening. In preparing…
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Continue reading »It can be hugely frustrating and even debilitating at those times when you feel unable to wrangle the data you need to create the graphic you had in mind. But failure is an important part of the creative process.
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Continue reading »James Cheshire, UCL and Alex Singleton, University of Liverpool As England emerged from its second national lockdown in early December, Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, faced an onslaught of questions from MPs on both sides of the House of Commons. Each demanded clarity on what the arrangements would be for their particular constituency under…
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Continue reading »Really excited to announce that Atlas of the Invisible, the third book I have co-authored with Oliver Uberti will be in bookshops soon! You can pre-order it here!
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“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” If you watched the UK government’s COVID-19 briefing to announce and England-wide lockdown, you might have been reminded of this quote by Harry S Truman. Following slide after slide of maps and charts, there was growing frustration about the way nationally important statistics were being presented to the…
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Continue reading »The power of maps lies in their ability to show us simultaneously that as global average temperatures rise, local conditions threaten to become ever more extreme. We now need to better harness that power to inspire action.
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Continue reading »The maps above were created for an article in The Conversation entitled Next slide please: data visualisation expert on what’s wrong with the UK government’s coronavirus charts in it I argue that there needs to be better data visualisations in government briefings. I give a particular example about how maps can appear differently depending on the…
Continue reading »Here is a short video I did for the Royal Geographical Society to show how new satellite data can reveal the daily changes to nitrogen dioxide (and other pollutants) in the atmosphere in unprecedented detail. For a longer version of the video and furt…
Continue reading »Here’s a video I filmed with the Financial Times to help explain the importance of gerrymandering to the outcomes of elections.
Continue reading »It is, of course, John Snow who is credited with using maps to demonstrate that the clusters of deaths from cholera in London’s Soho during London’s 1854 outbreak were caused by contaminated water. This marked a major shift in thinking away from the disease being transmitted through dirty air: the more widely accepted theory at […]
Continue reading »I’m delighted to announce two funded PhD opportunities at University College London with Kantar Worldpanel (@K_Worldpanel) and Arup. Successful candidates will join a cohort of students at the UBEL Doctoral Training Centre, become part of the team of researchers at based the Consumer Data Research Centre and UCL Geospatial Analytics and Computing Research Group. These are […]
Continue reading »Here is a quick example for how to get started with some of the more sophisticated point pattern analysis tools that have been developed for ecologists – principally the adehabitathr package – but that are very useful for human data. Ecologists deploy point pattern analysis to establish the “home range” of a particular animal based […]
Continue reading »Here’s my 2017/2018 Ultimate Gift List for Map Lovers! All the recommendations are for products I own – or have seen – and can genuinely endorse. I’ve listed them under broad categories of people you might want to buy them for. Hopefully they cater for a range of map-related interests and budgets. Enjoy! For those who […]
Continue reading »The graphic below shows the population of London across a number of transects overlain on the city’s underlying terrain. It was produced by Ordnance Survey in 1935 and is one of the few early examples I’ve seen of the organisation producing “data visualisations” alongside their famous maps (they do a lot more of this now […]
Continue reading »I’ve just discovered this really lovely graphic detailing a number of different map projections. It’s taken from the opening pages of the “Oxford Advanced Atlas” (Bartholomew, 1936) and features well-known projections such as the Mercator and Mollweide, through to the more obscure Van der Grinten, and the heart shaped Bonne. It even features the gores required […]
Continue reading »This animation of estimated global population density between 1970-2000 uses data produced by NASA’s SEDAC. For more information see here.
Continue reading »I recently stumbled upon a great dataset. It’s the first to provide comprehensive data for world city sizes as far back as 3700BC. The authors (Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma & Karen Seto) write: How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did cities influence their local and regional […]
Continue reading »There has been a resurgence of interest in data visualizations inspired by Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover. These so-called “Joy Plots” are easier to create thanks to the development of the “ggjoy” R package and also some nice code posted using D3. I produced a global population map (details here) using a similar technique in 2013 and since […]
Continue reading »The late Roger Tomlinson is considered the “Father of Geographic Information Systems” and he completed his PhD in the UCL Department of Geography in 1974. Tomlinson pioneered digital mapping – every map created using a computer today still uses the principles he laid down in his thesis and its associated work creating the “The Canada Geographic […]
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It has been a long held dream of mine to create a spinning globe using nothing but R (I wish I was joking, but I’m not). Thanks to the brilliant mapmate package created by Matt Leonawicz and shed loads of computing power, today that dream became a reality. The globe below took 19 hours and 30 […]
Continue reading »Thanks to the power of Reddit the “Population Lines” print (buy here) I created back in 2013 has attracted a huge amount of interest in the past week or so (a Europe only version made by Henrik Lindberg made the Reddit front page). There’s been lots of subsequent discussion about it’s inspiration, effectiveness as a form of […]
Continue reading »Creating a giant dot density map using R.
Continue reading »I recently stumbled upon a great dataset. It’s the first to provide comprehensive data for world city sizes as far back as 3700BC. The authors (Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma & Karen Seto) write: How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did cities influence their local and regional […]
Continue reading »I recently had the pleasure of giving a Creative Mornings talk. Each month there is a new theme that the presenters need to refer to – mine was “fantasy” so I chose to open with one of my favourite fantasy creatures: the unicorn. It’s a talk about the creative process behind Oliver Uberti and I’s […]
Continue reading »I discovered this on ebay last week and had to buy it. Entitled “Illustrations in Chartography” it shows a series of different cartographic (or chartographic?) techniques used in the “School Atlas of Physical Geography” by Alex K Johnston. You can see the full book here. It’s too good not to share.
Continue reading »I took a week of leave before term started and tried really hard not to check emails. With a few assessment deadlines due this week it’s left me with a small backlog of email queries from students. Seeing them as a chunk of enquiries like this, rather than the trickle I’m used to, it became […]
Continue reading »Lots happened in 2016 to keep cartographers busy…here are some of my highlights (in no particular order). Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line at the British Library is an absolutely extraordinary exhibition at the British Library. The breadth and quality of maps on display is amazing. (Inspired by the exhibition, I am giving a […]
Continue reading »There’s more data out there than ever before and I’m keen for students and researchers to make full use of it. Here are a number of my “go to” places for good data for geographers. This has a UK focus to reflect my interests. UK Population Data Datashine: This maps the 2011 Census for England […]
Continue reading »I was recently asked to deliver a days training on scientific data visualisation. I spent a while scanning through papers to pull out what I see as the “7 deadly sins” of academic data visualisation (there are probably many more) . These sins are rooted in a lack of time and training, an underestimation of the importance […]
Continue reading »This tutorial was first published in “Geocomputation a Practical Primer“. Here is a more complex example showing how to produce a map of 18th Century Shipping flows. The data have been obtained from the CLIWOC project and they represent a sample of digitised ships’ logs from the 18th Century. We are using a very small […]
Continue reading »All the DataShine websites (except DataShine Election) are derived from a common codebase and use the OpenLayers 3 mapping platform to display a full-window slippy map, with user controls and key overlaid. DataShine Census DataShine ScotlandCommissioned by the National Records of Scotland. DataShine Commute DataShine Scotland Commute. Commissioned by the National Records of Scotland. DataShine Region […]
Continue reading »Mapping London editors James and Ollie were invited earlier this year to create a drawing for the 10×10 charity auction taking place later this week in London. The auction is organised by Article 25, an architectural charity (we took part last year too) and each invited artist is assigned a grid square somewhere in central […]
Continue reading »Every year, for the last few years, Mapping London editors Oliver and James have been invited to create and submit an artwork for 10×10 London, a charity art auction organised by Article 25, the architectural development charity (originally called Architects for Aid). Being neither artists or architects, it is very flattering that we have been […]
Continue reading »*Cross-posted from London: The Information Capital’s website* London’s maps are special. They were drawn by pioneers such as Charles Booth, who revealed the full extent of the city’s poverty, Jon Snow, who deployed maps to determine the cause of cholera, and Phyllis Pearsall, who mapped 23,000 streets in her hugely popular ‘A to Z’ guide. […]
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*Cross-posted from London: The Information Capital’s website* Whenever I teach an R class, I usually start by saying how the software is now used by the likes of The New York Times graphics department or Facebook to manipulate their data and produce great visualisations. However, I have always struggled to give tangible examples of how […]
Continue reading »*Cross-posted from London: The Information Capital’s website* As London: The Information Capital enters its second year in print, we think its maps and graphics continue to show London at its best. Here are 12 of our favourites… 12. Photogenic Features A sleepy tiger, a blue whale, the Queen’s Guards and the arc of the London Eye. To get […]
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