The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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.
Continue reading »DataShine: Census uses ColorBrewer for its colours ramps. There are six ramps provided by default, which can be selected at the bottom of the website – five sequential ones and one diverging one, which is used for many maps where the standard deviation on the percentage population is a lot lower than the population percentage […]
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The south-west is known as a place where there are many second homes. In some villages, so many of the homes are empty for much of the year, or are simply holiday homes, that living there can seem even quieter than you would expect. Above is Newquay, the capital of surfing in the south-west and […]
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Cycling to work is on the increase but is at very low levels in most places in the UK – and there are very wide variations, even across towns and cities of similar size. Bristol (above) and London both see zones of high usage – typically in inner city suburbs popular with students and graduates: […]
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London is a significant destination for many people at various lifestages. One particularly popular inflow is university graduates looking for a place to live as they start their first career-minded job in the capital – coming from the other 100 or so universities in the UK outside London, or from Europe or elsewhere. It is […]
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Lewisham’s “data” I’ve been looking at a lot of London Borough council websites recently, for the Election Map. I’d rather I hadn’t – just one website would be better – but in London, each borough council publishes its local election results first and foremost to its own website, rather than it being pushed to a […]
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Here is the new political colour of London for 2014, following the local council elections last week. Rather than applying a simple colour to each of the 32 boroughs as most election maps do, I have instead represented all the 628 wards, across the boroughs, as a coloured circle. The map shows votes, not results. […]
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There’s a lot of ways you can define the centre of London. The Londonist had a good go last month, and CASA geographer Adam Dennett has a shot too, following an article in today’s Evening Standard newspaper. The former site of the Charing Cross, marked by a plaque in front of the Charles I statue […]
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I presented some research I’ve carried out at CASA, at the Cycle City conference in Leeds last week. The research shows how the numbers of bikeshare bikes and docking stations have varied between 2010 and 2014, for 46 systems across the world (not all systems have numbers for whole period of study). The numbers are […]
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I presented some research I’ve carried out at CASA, at the Cycle City conference in Leeds last week. The research shows how the numbers of bikeshare bikes and docking stations have varied between 2010 and 2014, for 46 systems across the world (not all systems have numbers for whole period of study). The numbers are […]
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A final post where I highlight more of the best papers at GISRUK 2014 in Glasgow – see Part 1 and Part 2. Geodemographic classification for Ireland It was an early start on a Bank Holiday Good Friday, particularly as I was commuting from Edinburgh, but I made it in for the second half of […]
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Following on from part one of my conference review, here are my favourite talks from the middle part of the conference. Social media and spatial modelling – Tweets and museums Robin Lovelace (Newcastle) won best paper at the end of the conference, for this talk on examining tweets “geofenced” around many local museums, to see […]
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I was at the Geographic Information Systems Research United Kingdom (GISRUK) 2014 conference last week. GISRUK is the key GIS conference for early-career academic researchers in the UK and Ireland, and is hosted by a different university in the British Isles each year. The audience are mainly UK academics, with young researchers and professors in […]
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I was at the Geographic Information Systems Research United Kingdom (GISRUK) 2014 conference last week. GISRUK is the key GIS conference for early-career academic researchers in the UK and Ireland, and is hosted by a different university in the British Isles each year. The audience are mainly UK academics, with young researchers and professors in […]
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[Updated – timeperiod-split maps added] Following on from my London bikeshare journeys graphic, here is the same technique applied with the data released by NYC Bike Share (aka Citi Bike) earlier this week. If you look carefully at the full size map you can see a thin line heading north-eastwards, initially well out of the […]
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[Updated – timeperiod-split maps added] Following on from my London bikeshare journeys graphic, here is the same technique applied with the data released by NYC Bike Share (aka Citi Bike) earlier this week. If you look carefully at the full size map you can see a thin line heading north-eastwards, initially well out of the […]
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The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) have produced a census for government open data availability for countries around the world, known as the Open Data Index. Each country is assigned scores for 10 attributes on openness and accessibility for each of 10 types of data (such as election results and pollution information). Currently the United Kingdom […]
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The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) have produced a census for government open data availability for countries around the world, known as the Open Data Index. Each country is assigned scores for 10 attributes on openness and accessibility for each of 10 types of data (such as election results and pollution information). Currently the United Kingdom […]
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Since launching the data store in early 2010, the Ordnance Survey have been releasing a number of updates to an interesting dataset – VectorMap District – which is a generalisation and simplification of their MasterMap “gold standard” dataset for Great Britain. The updates have been appearing roughly every 6-12 months, and by comparing them in […]
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Since launching the data store in early 2010, the Ordnance Survey have been releasing a number of updates to an interesting dataset – VectorMap District – which is a generalisation and simplification of their MasterMap “gold standard” dataset for Great Britain. The updates have been appearing roughly every 6-12 months, and by comparing them in […]
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The National Library of Scotland (NLS) yesterday unveiled a HUGE collection of maps that they have digitised and placed online. The maps, covering England and Wales, are historic Ordnance Survey maps that are between 60 and 170 years old and are at a high resolution. The scale is 6-inch-to-the-mile and covers the whole country. At […]
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At CASA we’ve always been keen on marrying the online with the tangible – such as the London Data Table (a real table, cut in the shape of London, showing live London data), PigeonSim (fly around a Google Earth view augmented with real-time information) and a couple of 3D printers, one of which was used […]
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I produced this data map which forms the front cover of this week’s British Medical Journal (BMJ). The graphic shows the volumes of Barclays Cycle Hire bikeshare users in London, based on journeys from February 2012 to January 2013 inclusive. The routes are the most likely routes between each pair of stations, as calculated using […]
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I produced this data map which forms the front cover of this week’s British Medical Journal (BMJ). The graphic shows the volumes of Barclays Cycle Hire bikeshare users in London, based on journeys from February 2012 to January 2013 inclusive. The routes are the most likely routes between each pair of stations, as calculated using […]
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[Buy this print!] London North/South shows every building block in central and inner city London, coloured blue if it’s north of the River Thames and red if it’s south. And that’s all. No other features are shown, and yet, from this simple premise, a map of the city appears. Almost every street is visible, as […]
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[Buy this print!] A couple of years I drew a quirky tube map to commemorate the completing of the circle on London’s Overground, affectionally known as the Ginger Line. The artwork has proven to be quite popular so I’ve produced a print run of an updated version of it. The new version retains the circles, […]
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Diamond Geezer escaped from London by plotting the shortest distance (as the crow flies) from his home to the London boundary, and then taking the shortest walking route that gets to that same point on the boundary. He identified a pub in Woodford Green as the closest point on the boundary from a nominal start […]
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I’m now the proud owner of this lovely green glass globe paperweight – it was my prize from the web map category of the mapping competition at the FOSS4G conference last year, but it’s taken me this long to finally get my hands on it, as I was disappearing on a train before the end […]
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London Tube Stats maps data about how the London Underground is used – how many people use each station at various times of the day, and where they go once they are on the tube. Transport for London, the city’s public transport authority, have a huge amount of data available in their Developers’ Area website, […]
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Ever been stuck with a bicycle with a flat tyre, in London but far from home? This has happened to me, many times, including twice in the last week, thanks to the usual combination of rain, grime and broken glass that seems to be endemic at this time of year here. & I don’t generally […]
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