The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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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The Borders Railway opened last week – a 30 mile new railway running between Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders, which was for the last fifty years the largest populated region in the UK without a railway connection. The railway largely follows the route of the Waverley Line, which used to connect Edinburgh to Carlisle via … Continue reading Demographics of the Borders Railway
Continue reading »Just a quick report on the 19th European Colloquium on Theoretical and Quantitative Geography, which took place near Bari in Puglia, South-east Italy, earlier this month, and which a significant amount of the quantitative geography group here at UCL attended, including myself. The meeting was held at an agricultural college in a university town a … Continue reading ECTQG 2015 →
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When people decide to move to London, one very simple model of desired location might be to work out how important staying somewhere nice, cheap, and well located for the centre of the city is – and the relative importance of these three factors. Unfortunately, like most places, you can’t get all three of these … Continue reading Living Somewhere Nice, Cheap and Close In – Pick Two! →
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We’ve made three changes to the DataShine Commute websites: For DataShine Scotland Commute we have made use of a new table, WU03BSC_IZ2011_Scotland, published recently on the Scotland’s Census website, which breaks out small-area journeys by mode of transport, in the same way that the England/Wales data does. The small-area geography used, Intermediate Geography “IG”, is … Continue reading Extra Detail in DataShine Commute
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I was in Manchester a couple of weeks ago for a UKDS conference on applications of the Census 2011 datasets that have been made available, through the ONS, NOMIS, UKDS and other organisations/projects. The conference was to celebrate the outputs and projects that have happened thus far, now that the Census itself is four years … Continue reading UKDS Census Applications Conference →
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I spent a week in Fuzhou earlier in July, in China’s Fujian provice, presenting and attending a summer school and conference, respectively, at Fuzhou University. I’ve already blogged the conference itself (read it here) but during the week I got plenty of time, outside of the conference to get a feel for Fuzhou and this … Continue reading China: Fuzhou →
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OpenStreetMap is still surprisingly incomplete when it comes to showing buildings for the London area, this is a real contrast to other places (e.g. Birmingham, New York City, Paris) when it comes to completeness of buildings, this is despite some good datasets (e.g Ordnance Survey OpenMap Local) including building outlines. It’s one reason why I … Continue reading OpenStreetMap: London Building Coverage →
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Here’s a graphic I’ve made by taking a number of screenshots of DataShine Commute graphics, showing the different methods of travelling to work in the City of London, that is, the Square Mile area at the heart of London where hundreds of thousands and financial and other employees work. All the maps are to the … Continue reading The City of London Commute →
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Last week I was in China for the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Spatial Data Mining (ICSDM), travelling with the my centre director who was keynoting and giving a day’s teaching at the conference’s accompanying summer school. The conference was based in Fuzhou University, on the western edge of Fuzhou in Fujian Province, a city … Continue reading China: ICSDM Conference →
Continue reading »There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Tube Line Closure Map accesses Transport for London’s REST API for line disruption information (both live and planned) and uses the information there to animate a geographical vector map of the network, showing closed sections as lines flashing dots, with solid lines for unaffected parts. The idea is similar to TfL’s official disruption map, … Continue reading Tube Line Closure Map →
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The latest web map in the DataShine website portfolio is DataShine Election, which shows results from the 2015 and 2010 UK General Elections.
You can view the interactive map or read more about it.
When I first moved to UCL CASA back in 2010, the first online map I created from scratch was one showing swings in the general election that year. So it seemed fitting to update the old code with the data from the 2015 general election, which took place last week. You can see the resulting … Continue reading General Election Maps for 2015 →
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Above is an excerpt of a large, coloured-dot based graphic showing the locations of street trees in Rotherhithe, part of the London Borough of Southwark in London, as released by them to the OpenStreetMap database back in 2010. You can download the full version (12MB PDF). Street trees are trees on public land managed by … Continue reading Street Trees of Southwark →
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The week before last I was at GISRUK, the long-running annual conference for early (and not-so-early) career researchers in GI Science in the UK, Ireland and further afield. This year’s conference was in Leeds and attracted a record number of 200+ delegates. I presented a poster at a meeting the day before the main conference, … Continue reading GISRUK 2015 →
Continue reading »GIS software is used by many professionals to process spatial information, but the results are often poorly presented and the resulting map can be unattractive. GIS packages, such as QGIS, are increasingly including a broad range of cartographic styling and map design options, to present synthesised spatial data attractively, but it remains all too easy … Continue reading Book Review: GIS Cartography (2nd Ed) →
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I’ve created an Election 2015 Time Map which maps the estimated declaration times that the Press Association have published. It follows on from a similar map of the Scottish independence referendum. Each constituency is represented by a circle which is roughly in its centre (using a longest-interior-vertex centroid determined in QGIS). The area of the … Continue reading Election Time! →
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Stations on the tube map with multiple lines are normally shown with a white circle (except where obscured by a disabled access blob) indicating connections where you can change lines there, while continuing on a single journey (and so not have to pay for two). However, there are a number of connections not shown on … Continue reading Out of Station Interchanges (OSIs) →
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Ordnance Survey have this week released four new additions to their Open Data product suite. The four, which were announced earlier this month, are collectively branded as OS Open and include OS Open Map Local, which, like Vector Map District (VMD), is a vector dataset containing files for various feature types, such as building polygons … Continue reading OS Open →
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A friend forwarded me this article which discusses this paper by researchers at the Yahoo Labs offices in Barcelona and the University of Turin. The basic idea is that they crowdsourced prettiness of places in central London, via either/or pairs photographs, to build up a field of attractiveness, then adjusted a router based on this … Continue reading Taking the Scenic Route – Quantitatively? →
Continue reading »An encouraging announcement from BIS (the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) a few days ago regarding future Open Data products from the Ordnance Survey (press release here) and the Ordnance Survey – two pieces of good news: The OS will be launching a new, detailed set of vector data as Open Data at the … Continue reading Ordnance Survey Open Data – The Next Level of Detail →
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Many of my visualisations have focused on London – there is an advantage of being in the city and surrounded by the data, which means that London is often the “default” city to map. However, I’ve created a couple of Manchester versions of my popular maps Ward Words and Ward Work. Logistics and time reasons … Continue reading Manchester – Languages and Jobs →
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I’ll be gradually tweaking this article to add/amend sources, clarifications and develop some of my arguments. A big announcement for the “Boris Bikes” today, aka Barclays Cycle Hire. London’s bikeshare system, the second largest in the western world after Paris’s Velib and nearly five years old, will be rebranded as Santander Cycles, and the bikes … Continue reading Seeing Red: 15 Ways the Boris Bikes of London Could be Better →
Continue reading »Various websites I’ve built, and mentioned here on oobrien.com from time to time, are down until Monday lunchtime, due to a major power upgrade for the building that the server is in. This affects the following websites: DataShine CDRC Bike Share Map Tube Tongues OpenOrienteeringMap (extremely degraded) Some other smaller visualisations However the following are … Continue reading Downtime →
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GeoComputation: A Practical Primer, edited by Profs Chris Brunsdon and Alex Singleton, has just been published by SAGE. The book acts both as a reference guide to the field and as a guide to help you get to know aspects of it. Each chapter includes a worked example with step-by-step instructions. Each chapter has a … Continue reading GeoComputation: A Practical Primer →
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How many of London’s 32 boroughs (& the City of London) would you pass through on a single end-to-end journey on the tube? It turns out that if you travel the length of the Piccadilly Line (Uxbridge branch), then, in a single journey, you’ll pass through 14 boroughs and stop at all of them but … Continue reading London Boroughs and Tube Lines →
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Here is a guide to clone a WordPress(.org) blog, on the same server, 10 steps, on Linux, You’ll definitely need admin access to the blog itself, and probably to the database and server too, depending on your setup. I did this recently as I needed a copy of an existing production site, to hack on. … Continue reading Quick-and-Dirty WordPress Site Cloning →
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<rant> Three maps with glaring errors which I came across yesterday. I’m hesitant to criticise – many of my own maps have, I am sure, issues too (i.e. my Electric Tube map, on the right, is deliberately way off.) But I couldn’t resist calling out this trio which I spotted within a few hours of … Continue reading Bad Maps →
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As part of a project to move most of my OpenLayers 2-powered websites to OpenLayers 3, I have recently converted two more – DataShine: Travel to Work Flows and the North/South Interactive Map. Unlike the main DataShine: Census website, both of these newer conversions include vector geospatial data, so there was additional learning involved during … Continue reading OpenLayers 3 and Vector Data →
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