The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
As part of a presentation I gave yesterday at the RSAI-BIS (Regional Science Association International – British & Irish Section) annual conference on DataShine Travel to Work maps, I outlined the following eight techniques to avoid swamping origin/destination (aka flow) maps with masses of data, typically shown as straight lines between each pair of locations. … Continue reading Eight Ways to Better Flow Maps →
Continue reading »London has a new bikeshare system – and it’s appeared by surprise, overnight. oBike is a dockless bikeshare. The company is based in Singapore, where it runs a number of large dockless systems there and in China, Australia and the Netherlands, it is also likely coming to Washington DC in the USA and to Berlin … Continue reading Dockless Bikeshare in London – oBike is Here →
Continue reading »I’ve recently a published on CDRC Maps a map of Broadband Speed in the UK. This is the average download speed for residential properties, right across the UK. It’s based on data annually released by OFCOM (I’m using the most recent dataset from 2016). I’m using a Purple-White-Green colour ramp, where Purple indicates areas with … Continue reading Broadband Speed in the UK →
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Panama is a Central American country with around 4 million population. The country is split into 10 provinces (including one that was split from another in 2014). The population is obliged to register for and obtain an ID card, or “cedula” which contains an interesting attribute. The prefix of their ID number indicates their province … Continue reading Panama’s Population Geographies →
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My latest London data visualisation crunches an interesting dataset from the Department of Transport. The data is available across England, although I’ve chosen London in particular because of its more interesting (i.e. not just car dominated) traffic mix. I’ve also focused on just the data for 8am to 9am, to examine the height of the … Continue reading Evolution of London’s Rush Hour Traffic Mix →
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The above map shows the estimated routes and flows of over 16 million users of the bikeshare in Mexico City, “ECOBICI“, across the 22 months between February 2015 and November 2016, using data from their open data portal. The system has been around since 2011 but its most recent major expansion, to the south, was … Continue reading How Mexico City Does Bikeshare →
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I’ve produced an updated version of a graphic that my colleague Dr James Cheshire created a few years ago, showing how the estimated life expectancy at birth various throughout the capital, using a geographical tube map to illustrate the sometimes short-distance changes. You can see an interactive version on my tube data visualisation platform. Click … Continue reading Lives on the Line v2: Estimated Life Expectancy by Small Areas →
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Below is a presentation that combined my talks last Thursday and Friday at the Smart Mobility forums in central Mexico City, organised by ITDP Mexico and funded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Prosperity Fund (respresented by the British Embassy in Mexico). The Thursday presentation focused on the third-party app ecosystem that exists around bikesharing … Continue reading Smart Mobility Meeting in Mexico City →
Continue reading »November is shaping up to be a very busy month for me, in terms of giving talks – I will have presented 12 times by the end of the month. I appreciate that lecturers might not agree that this is a particular busy month! Anyway, here’s a list of them: 1 November – CDRC Maps: … Continue reading Twelve Talks →
Continue reading »Here’s an attempt to create a simple taxonomy of the currently active and popular web mapping frameworks available. This covers web mapping that delivers a consumer-navigable geographic “slippy” map of raster and/or vector tiles containing bespoke geographic data. Ecosystems Hosted Wrappers Managed Wrappers Managed APIs Open Frameworks Spatial Servers Server Programming MapBox Studio Carto Builder … Continue reading Taxonomy of Web Mapping Frameworks →
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So Big Data Here, a little pop-up exhibition of hyperlocal data, has just closed, having run continuously from Tuesday evening to this morning, as part of Big Data Week. We had many people peering through the windows of the characterful North Lodge building beside UCL’s main entrance on Gower Street, particularly during the evening rush … Continue reading Big Data Here: The Code →
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The Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) at UCL is organising a short pop-up exhibition on hyperlocal data: Big Data Here. The exhibition is taking place in North Lodge, the small building right beside UCL’s main entrance. The exhibition materials are supplied by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). Inside, a big projection shows local … Continue reading Big Data Here →
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Here are the busiest tube station quarter-hour periods, based on the Transport for London 2015 RODS data (modelled, based on typical autumn weekday), used in TubeHeartbeat, adding together entries, exits and interchange stats and excluding Kensington Olympia. The main pattern shows that stations further out from London’s main work areas (The West End, the City … Continue reading Busiest Tube Station Times →
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The British Cartography Society and Society of Cartographers* once again combined their two annual conferences together, for a two-day meet in Cheltenham in early September. After last year’s win for the DataShine website, I was there in a more passive capability, although my colleague Dr Cheshire, who collected a trio of prizes last year, presented … Continue reading Mapping at the Edge – the BCS/SoC Conference 2016 →
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A new map on CDRC Maps showing perhaps one of the simplest demographic metrics – residential population density – how many people live in each hectare across the UK. The data is available at the smallest statistical area available (output areas in GB and small areas in NI) and I have combined this with the … Continue reading Population Density and Urban/Rural Split of the UK →
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Like its English counterpart IMD, SIMD is released every few years by the Scottish government, as a dataset which scores and ranks every small statistical area in Scotland according to a number of measures. These are then combined to form an overall rank and measure of deprivation for the area. This can then be mapped … Continue reading SIMD 2016: The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation →
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As a follow-up to my intro post about TubeHeartbeat, here’s some notes on the API usage that allowed me to get the digital cartography right, and build out the interactive visualisation I wanted to. The key technology behind the visualisation is the HERE JavaScript API. This not only displays the background HERE map tiles and … Continue reading Behind the Code in TubeHeartbeat →
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TubeHeartbeat is a interactive map that I recently built as part of a commission by HERE, using the HERE JavaScript API. It visualises a fascinating dataset that TfL makes available sporadically – the RODS (Rolling Origin Destination Survey) – which reveals the movements of people on the London Underground network in amazing detail. The data … Continue reading TubeHeartbeat →
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There was a time when Google Maps was an ugly ducking. It started life as a road map, and its grey background was decryed at a memorable keynote at the British Cartographic Society annual conference 8 years, contrasting with the classic Ordnance Survey Landranger maps where the spaces between roads were normally full of “something” … Continue reading Putting Cartography Back on the Map – Google Maps Getting Prettier →
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The ONS publish small-area population estimates annually, for England and Wales, and the NRS similarly do for Scotland. By taking two of these datasets, we can see how the population of Great Britain is changing – births, deaths, internal and international migration and military deployments/homecomings all act to fluctuate the population. I’ve taken the 2011 … Continue reading Population Change in Great Britain 2011-14 →
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I was at FOSS4G UK 2016 which took place at the new Ordnance Survey buildings in Southampton, a few weeks ago. FOSS4G is short for “Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial”, and the conference focuses on some of the key free GIS software such as QGIS and PostGIS. This was a UK-focused event, following … Continue reading FOSS4GUK Conference →
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A startup with a billion dollar asset. This is how HERE’s new CEO Edzard Overbeek describes the location services company that is making a striking pitch for being the third major digital mapping and location platform alongside Google and Apple. HERE has had an interesting recent history. Originally NAVTEQ, one of the major cross-world road … Continue reading Inside HERE →
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I was kindly invited, earlier this week, to take part in “insideHERE” in Berlin, a small event run at the HERE HQ in Berlin. HERE, being born out of the ashes of Navteq and Nokia Maps, is now owned by a consortium of German car companies. For the special event, HERE’s developers and engineers opened … Continue reading Testing Map-Based UIs for Self-Driving Cars: HERE’s Knight Rider →
Continue reading »I recently gave a presentation as part of an NCRM Administrative Data Research Centre England course: Introduction to Data Visualisation. The presentation focused on adapting choropleths to create better “real life” maps of socioeconomic data, showing the examples of CDRC Maps and named. I also presented some work from Neal Hudson, Duncan Smith and Ben … Continue reading Mapping Data: Beyond the Choropleth →
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Cross-posted from the DataShine blog. Here’s a little visualisation created with the DataShine platform. It’s the DataShine Commute map, adapted to show online cycle flows, but all of them at once – so you don’t need to click on a location to see the flow lines. I’ve also added colour to show direction. Flows in … Continue reading The Great British Bike to Work →
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Here’s a little visualisation created with the DataShine platform. It’s the DataShine Commute map, adapted to show online cycle flows, but all of them at once – so you don’t need to click on a location to see the flow lines. I’ve also added colour to show direction. Flows in both directions will “cancel out” … Continue reading The Great British Bike to Work
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Above: Areas of east and south-east London with more than 8% of inhabitants being originally from (from top to bottom) India (in East Ham), Lithuania (in Beckton) and Nigeria & Nepal (in Abbey Wood). Ever wondered why some branches of Tesco, the ubiquitous supermarket, have an American food section, while others have a Polish food … Continue reading A Map of Country of Birth Across the UK →
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The London Panopticon utilises the traffic camera feed from the TfL API, which recently added 10-second-long video clips from the traffic cameras on TfL “red route” roads, to show the current state of traffic near you. It loads the latest videos from the nearest camera in each compass direction to you. The images are nearly-live … Continue reading London Panopticon →
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Top Industry maps the most popular employment for each of the ~220000 statistical small areas* within the UK. I’ve reused the “top result” technique that has produced interesting maps for travel to work, to look at the Industry of Employment tables produced by the national statistics agencies, from the 2011 Census. The tables I’ve used … Continue reading Working Nation →
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Following on from my two maps of the small-area modal method of travel to work – one map includes cars and so is most interesting for London, and one map excludes cars and so is most interesting for the rest of the country, where cars otherwise dominate – I’ve refined the car-excluding map and introduced … Continue reading The Battle of the Roads →
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If you are looking to name-check DataShine in a paper, then we now have the citation for you! Interactive mapping for large, open demographic data sets using familiar geographical features is our paper (authors Oliver O’Brien and James Cheshire), published in Journal of Maps, as open access, so you can read it right now. DOI: … Continue reading DataShine Papers!
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named is a little website that I have recently co-written as part of an ongoing ESRC-funded project on UK surnames that is being conducted here at UCL Department of Geography. I put together the website and adapted for the UK some code on generating heatmaps showing regions of unusual popularity of a surname, that was … Continue reading named →
Continue reading »I attended the Cartographic Summit which took place at the Esri campus in Redlands, California, earlier this week. Some notes from the week, which was co-organised by Esri and the ICA (International Cartographic Association). Here are some notes about the event. The attendee list included some key names in modern cartography, including Cynthia Brewer, creator … Continue reading ICA/Esri Cartographic Summit →
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Here’s a map of the top method of travel to work, for people aged 16-74 and in employment, at the time of the 2011 Census: The pattern is, fairly evenly, that car use (light blue) dominates except for people living in the very centre of cities, where walking to work (green) is the most popular … Continue reading What if There Were No Cars? →
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We don’t have open individual building age data in the UK, unlike in some other countries (the data has been used to great effect in New York City and Amsterdam) but the Valuation Office Agency, which amongst other things decides council tax bandings for residential properties in England and Wales, has published some interesting data … Continue reading The Age of Buildings →
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Here’s an interesting graph, which combines data on total journeys per day on London’s bicycle sharing system (currently called “Santander Cycles”) from the London Data Store, with counts of available bicycles per day to hire, from my own research database. The system launched in summer 2010 and I started tracking the numbers almost from the … Continue reading London’s Bikeshare Needs A Redistribution of Stations →
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I presented a talk on geodemographic mapping, at a visual methods workshop “In/Visibility and Difference” which took place in Berlin at Bard College (formerly the European College of Liberal Arts). The workshop was organised by the TransformIG project at Humboldt University in Berlin, which was also the venue for the keynote part of the meeting. … Continue reading In/Visibility and Difference – Visual Methods Workshop in Berlin →
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I’ve just now published a number of maps on the CDRC Maps platform which uses the DataShine mapping style (more about DataShine) to show demographic data relating to consumer and other datasets. The maps relate to the Indices of Deprivation 2015, small-areas measure of deprivation in England, which were compiled and published at the end … Continue reading Changes in Deprivation in England, 2010-15 →
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DataShine Census has won the British Cartography Society’s Avenza Award for Electronic Mapping, for 2015. The glass trophy and certificate were presented to DataShine creator Oliver O’Brien at the award ceremony and gala dinner for the combined BCS/Society of Cartographers conference “Mapping Together” which took place in York, earlier this September. The prize was presented … Continue reading DataShine Wins the BCS Avenza Award for Electronic Mapping →
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DataShine Census has won the British Cartography Society’s Avenza Award for Electronic Mapping, for 2015. The glass trophy and certificate were presented to DataShine creator Oliver O’Brien at the award ceremony and gala dinner for the combined BCS/Society of Cartographers conference “Mapping Together” which took place in York, earlier this September. The prize was presented … Continue reading DataShine Wins the BCS Avenza Award for Electronic Mapping
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