The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Blood is everywhere when it comes to describing cities. We have arterial roads, pulsing transport flows, and cities with different metabolisms. Thanks to great new datasets and visualisation software the analogy of cities with pulsing flows is being increasingly utilised for explanatory mapping. For example the work of UCL CASA’s Jon Reades above depicts the London Underground network …
Continue reading »I recently had the pleasure of presenting at the first Data Visualisation London Meetup event where I spoke about some of work we do at UCL CASA. A fair chunk of the slides were movies so I thought it best to stick them in a blog post. If you like what you see you can …
Continue reading »Last year Eric Fischer produced a great map (see below) visualising the language communities of Twitter. The map, perhaps unsurprisingly, closely matches the geographic extents of the world’s major linguistic groups. On seeing these broad patterns I wondered how well they applied to the international communities living in London. The graphic above shows the spatial …
Continue reading »I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands) sailing between 1750 and 1850. The creation of this dataset was completed as part of the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) project. The routes are plotted from the …
Continue reading »Last week I attended the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference and heard a talk by Robert Groves, Director of the US Census Bureau. Aside the impressiveness of the bureau’s work I was struck by how Groves conceived of visualisations as requiring either fast thinking or slow thinking. Fast thinking data visualisations offer a clear message without the need …
Continue reading »Profs Mike Batty and Paul Longley have been asked to write a short report on Quantitative Geography, GIS and Cartography for the ESRC’s current ‘benchmarking review’ of UK human geography, undertaken in partnership with the RGS-IBG. They would very much welcome views and contributions from QMRG and GISRG members in seeking to answer the following […]
Continue reading »Finding ways to effectively map population data is a big issue in spatial data visualization. The standard practice uses choropleth maps that simply colour administrative units based on the combined characteristics of the people that live there (see below). These maps are popular with cartographers for a couple of reasons. You get a clear sense that the …
Continue reading »As a cyclist in London you can do your best to avoid left turning buses and dozy pedestrians. One thing you can’t really avoid though is pollution (although I accept cyclists probably aren’t much worse off than pedestrians and drivers in this respect). To illustrate this I have taken data for 3.2 million journeys from …
Continue reading »The above map (and this one) was produced using R and ggplot2 and serve to demonstrate just how sophisticated R visualisations can be. We are used to seeing similar maps produced with conventional GIS platforms or software such as Processing but I hadn’t yet seen one from the R community (feel free to suggest some …
Continue reading »Streetview Stereographic is a great website that takes Google Streetview pictures and turns them into stereographic images. These images look great, especially in urban environments and have previously taken a…
Continue reading »If I said a country was 1594719800 metres squared it would mean a lot less to you than if I said it was about the size of Greater London (so long as you know about how big Greater London is). For this reason the media tend to report the extent of a flood in …
Continue reading »Yesterday the government released data about the size of the central civil estate. The infographic shows this (green box) compared to well-known geographic features in Britain. The government press release stated that the data are a snapshot of the estate and shows that at 1 September 2011: the estate covered by this data is 16, 411, 676 …
Continue reading »I have been using R (a free statistics and graphics software package) now for the past four years or so and I have seen it become an increasingly powerful method of both analysing and visualising spatial data. Crucially, more and more people are writing accessible tutorials (see here) for beginners and intermediate users and the development …
Continue reading »It would be a shame to end the year without a festive map! Jack Harrison (@jacksfeed) is studying for a research masters in “Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation” at UCL. I teach on the course and it obviously hasn’t worked Jack hard enough this term as he has had time to slack off and produce …
Continue reading »I have spent the last few years investigating the geography of family names (also called surnames). I work with the team who assembled the UCL Department of Geography Worldnames Database that contains the names and geographic locations of over 300 million people in nearly 30 countries (a few of these are yet to be added to the website). My research has …
Continue reading »As 2011 draws to a close it is worth reflecting on what, I think, has been a defining year for mapping and spatial analysis. Geographic data have become open, big, and widely available, leading to the production of new and interesting maps on an almost daily basis. The increasing utilisation of technology such as Google Fusion Tables has …
Continue reading »Transport for London have just released their performance data (link here) for the London Underground network. It is in the form of a really detailed file that contains, amongst other things, the “Peak Operated Kilometres” and “Peak Passenger Journeys” for the past 6 years or so. If you total the distances covered by the Tube …
Continue reading »Mapping London Life is the title of the talk I gave at […]
Continue reading »This week I am giving a talk on some of the London maps that we produce in CASA. The hours of work I put in to such maps is minuscule compared to the amount of effort and time that the OpenStreetMap community have invested in producing a truly open (and often more accurate) map of London (and the …
Continue reading »Duncan Smith, a colleague of ours, has written a great […]
Continue reading »Last week I attended a “Beyond 2011” Census event organised by the Prof. Dave Martin and the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The attendees came from central and local government, private companies that utlise census data, and a few universities. The majority there (based on an approximate straw poll) believed that there would not be a …
Continue reading »*This post has been cross-posted from the Mapping London blog.* A few months back I had the honour of being asked to approve the use of a couple of excerpts from my London Surname Map in The Times Atlas of London. The wait was finally over last week when I received my copy in the …
Continue reading »Another day, another Twitter map- this time showing the global distribution of tweets that link to academic journal articles. I am always a bit skeptical of Twitter data (especially with location information) but as an academic seeking to publish in many of the journals that feature in people’s tweets I was prepared to make an …
Continue reading »This week I feature on the 4th Episode of the Global Lab podcast. The podcast is a great new initiative led by Martin and Steve from CASA where they talk about cities, global connectivity and the impact of technology on people’s lives. Episode four features some horrendous physics jokes, Einstein’s Garden at the Green Man festival …
Continue reading »We are pleased to announce that Tadas Nikonovas from the Department of Geography at Swansea University is the winner of this year’s QMRG Undergraduate Dissertation Prize. Tadas’ dissertation entitled “Artificial light emissions in Europe. Trends from a DMSP satellite fifteen year record” was applauded for its interesting and relevant topic, its use of complex quantitative […]
Continue reading »A map doing the rounds at the moment (thanks to a plug from flowingdata) is Derek Watkin’s brilliant map of “generic” terms for rivers in the United States (above).The map shows how different cultural and linguistic factors have influenced the naming of geographic features in the US. For example French settlers named the streams they encountered “bayous”.
Continue reading »“Treemaps display hierarchical (tree-structured) data as a set of nested rectangles. Each branch of the tree is given a rectangle, which is then tiled with smaller rectangles representing sub-branches. A leaf node’s rectangle has an area proportional to a specified dimension on the data. Often the leaf nodes are colored to show a separate dimension of …
Continue reading »Welcome to the the new look Spatial Analysis blog. My last post was way back in March so I have a lot of catching up to do! The prolonged absence was due to all my energy being spent on completing my PhD thesis in order that I could get it out of the way before …
Continue reading »In the UK, August is exam results month for 16-18 year olds. Every year, photos of leaping teenagers clutching their results are accompanied by reports of record attainment rates, debates around how challenging modern exams are and, more so recently than ever, concerns for the number of sixth form and university places. Back in March …
Continue reading »The Guardian have been keeping track of the magistrate cases and convictions resulting from the recent rioting in England. Using this data I have produced the “tree map” below. For each magistrate I have grouped each offence committed and represented it as a square. The size of the square represents the number of people who …
Continue reading »Chris Gale, a fellow UCL Geographer, has produced these maps showing the change in deprivation scores in London between 2007 and 2010. They show a measure called the Index of…
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