The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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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This post is cross-posted from oobrien.com. OpenLayers is a powerful web mapping API that DataShine uses to display full-page “slippy” maps. DataShine: Census has recently been upgraded to use OpenLayers 3. Previously it was powered by OpenLayers 2, so it doesn’t sound like a major change, but OL3 is a major rewrite and as such … Continue reading OpenLayers 3 →
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OpenLayers is a powerful web mapping API that many of my websites use to display full-page “slippy” maps. DataShine: Census has been upgraded to use OpenLayers 3. Previously it was powered by OpenLayers 2, so it doesn’t sound like a major change, but OL3 is a major rewrite and as such it was quite an … Continue reading OpenLayers 3 and DataShine →
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As a weekend project, I’ve made an interactive version of my London North/South artwork. As well as the blue and red house silhouettes, assembled in QGIS, I’ve added in GeoJSON files of the River Thames (from Ordnance Survey Vector Map District, like the buildings) and of tube/DLR/Overground stations – the location/name/network data is from this […]
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One of the more spatially interesting datasets on DataShine: Census is about central heating – do houses have it, and what is the fuel source? The table is QS415EW and here’s what one of the categories look like on DataShine. You’ll notice a distinctive pattern, with city centres and the countryside having low proportions of […]
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Britain’s “top” primary roads – the A1, A2, A3… to A9 – are arranged in a particular pattern, with the A1-A6 radiating out clockwise from London and the A7 to A9 similarly radiating around Edinburgh. I used Gemma, an old UCL CASA project that Steve and I worked on back in 2011, to draw, from […]
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Cross-posted from Mapping London, edited slightly. This is a map of geolocated Tweets for the whole world – I’ve zoomed into London here. The map was created by Eric Fischer of Mapbox, who collected the tweets over several years. The place where each tweet is posted from is shown by a green dot. There are […]
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This book, which features great examples of London building architecture, is itself distinctively designed and immaculately presented. It’s been out for a couple of years now, however I was recommended it when purchasing another book recently on Amazon, as an impulse purchase, it’s an excellent find. The book was authored by Hannah Dipper and Robin […]
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I contributed a number of graphics to LONDON: The Information Capital, a book co-written by Dr James Cheshire, also of UCL Geography. Two of my graphics that made it into the book were based on data from OpenStreetMap, a huge dataset of spatial data throughout the world. This first graphic forms one of the chapter […]
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If you are a Londoner but felt that Tube Tongues passed you by, maybe because you live in south-east London or another part of the city that doesn’t have a tube station nearby, then here’s a special version of Tube Tongues for you. Like the original, it maps the most popularly spoken language after English […]
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DataShine Census has two new features – local area rescaling and data download. The features were launched at the UK Data Service‘s Census Research User Conference, last week at the Royal Statistical Society. Local Area Rescaling This helps draw out demographic versions in the current view. You may be in a region where a particular […]
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Cross-posted from the Datashine Blog. DataShine Census has two new features – local area rescaling and data download. The features were launched at the UK Data Service‘s Census Research User Conference, last week at the Royal Statistical Society. Local Area Rescaling This helps draw out demographic versions in the current view. You may be in […]
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As a followup to Tube Tongues I’ve published Working Lines which is exactly the same concept, except it looks at the occupation statistics from the 2011 census, and shows the most popular occupation by tube station. Again, lots of spatial clustering of results, and some interesting trends come out – for example, the prevalence of […]
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I’ve extended my map of tube journeys and busy stations (previous article here) to add in an interesting metric from the 2011 census – that of the second most commonly spoken language (after English) that people who live nearby speak. To do this I’ve analysed all “output areas” which wholly or partly lie within 200m […]
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I was in Vienna for most of last week, presenting at a satellite workshop of the GIScience conference, before joining the main event for the latter part of the week. GIScience is a biennial international academic conference, alternating between America and Europe. At the intersection between geography, GIS and information visualisation. It is very much […]
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I’m presenting a short paper today at the Uncertainty Workshop at GIScience 2014 in Vienna, looking at cartographic methods of showing uncertainty in the new OAC 2011 geodemographic maps of the UK using textures and hatching to the quality of fit of areas to their defined “supergroup” geodemographic cluster. Mapnik was used – its compositing […]
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A final update to my Scottish Independence Referendum Data Map – the circle borders now show the turnout percentage, with the highest (>90%) as a solid green, the lowest showing as red. There is a weak (R^2 = 0.177) negative correlation between the Yes vote %, and the Turnout %, suggesting that the Yes campaign […]
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As a learning exercise, I have attempted to “migrate” my #indyref map from OpenLayers 2.13.1 to OpenLayers 3.0.0. It seemed a good time to learn this, because the OpenLayers website now shows v3 as the default version for people to download and use. I use the term “migrate” in inverted commas, because, really, OpenLayers 3 […]
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Scotland’s population is heavily skewed towards the central belt (Glasgow/Edinburgh) which will affect likely reporting times of the independence referendum in the early hours of Friday 19 September, this being dependent both on the overall numbers of votes cast in each of the 32 council areas, and the time taken to get ballot boxes from […]
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The above graphic (click for full version) shows 12.4 million bicycle journeys taken on the Barclays Cycle Hire system in London over seven months, from 13 December 2013, when the south-west expansion to Putney and Hammersmith went live, until 19 July 2014 – the latest journey data available from Transport for London’s Open Data portal. It’s an update of a […]
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The 2011 Area Classification for Output Areas, or 2011 OAC, is a geodemographic classification that was developed by Dr Chris Gale during his Ph.D at UCL Geography over the last few years, in close conjunction with the Office for National Statistics, who have endorsed it and adopted it as their official classification and who collected […]
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The 2011 Area Classification for Output Areas, or 2011 OAC, is a geodemographic classification that was developed by Dr Chris Gale during his Ph.D at UCL Geography over the last few years, in close conjunction with the Office for National Statistics, who have endorsed it and adopted it as their official classification and who collected […]
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I attended the Big Data and Urban Informatics workshop in UIC Chicago in early August. My previous blog post outlined my presentation at the workshop. Here’s my notes and thoughts on some of the other talks that I attended. Above, the AURIN Workbench is a sophisticated platform for city authorities in Australia to output their […]
Continue reading »Earlier this month, I gave a short presentation at the Big Data and Urban Informatics Workshop, which took place at UIC (University of Illinois in Chicago). My presentation was an abridged version of a paper that I prepared for the workshop. In due course, I plan to publish the full paper, possibly as a CASA […]
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The Diamond Geezer is, this month, climbing the highest tops in each one of London’s 33 boroughs. To find the highest points, he’s used a number of websites which list the places. These derive the data from contour lines, perhaps supplemented with GPS or other measurements. However, another interesting – and new – datasource for […]
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Today, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released the Travel to Work Flows based on the 2011 census. These are a giant origin-destination matrix of where people commute to work. There are various tables that have been released. I’ve chosen the Method of Travel to Work and visualised the flows, for England and Wales, […]
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Today, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released the Travel to Work Flows based on the 2011 census. These are a giant origin-destination matrix of where people commute to work. There are various tables that have been released. I’ve chosen the Method of Travel to Work and visualised the flows, for England and Wales, […]
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Above is a Wordle of the messages displayed on the big dot-matrix displays (aka variable message signs) that sit beside major roads in London, over the last couple of months. The larger the word, the more often it is shown on the screens. The data comes from Transport for London via their Open Data Users […]
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The labels that appear on the map add some context, and help you find out where you are, but we realise that sometimes these labels can be less than helpful, and can obscure the data. With this in mind, we have now added a “Labels” button, beside the “Buildings” button, at the bottom. Clicking this […]
Continue reading »DataShine has been out for around a week now, and we’ve made some changes to fix small bugs. Specifically: DataShine should work much better in Internet Explorer 9 now, as we now prompt this browser to use compatibility mode, with which the website displays correctly. When showing a dataset that diverges around the mean, we […]
Continue reading »This is a more zoomed-out map, showing how the proportion of people stating they had no religion, varies around the the country. I’m using a ColorBrewer diverging colour ramp “BrBG” which diverges around the average value of around 25%. Turquoise areas show concentrations of large numbers of atheists. Live map here.
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This week, James and I launch DataShine: Census. This is part of the ESRC BODMAS project, here at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, that is led by James, and which started at the beginning of this year. DataShine: Census shows web maps of the Quick Statistics aggregate tables of Census data for England/Wales for […]
Continue reading »This map shows the proportion of people that consider themselves to be in very good health, in the Liverpool and Wirral area. By using a diverging colour scheme, it shows there are stark differences between the two sides of the River Mersey, and within Liverpool itself – even within the city centre area.
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