The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 […]
Continue reading »The blog is now at http://oobrien.com/. The old oliverobrien.co.uk domain will continue to work for a couple of weeks. My leisure blog has also moved and is now at http://blog.oomap.co.uk/. Why? I’m consolidating the number of domains I own, to make management easier.
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The charity auction for the artwork/map that I created with Dr James Cheshire, Data Windows, took place last night, at the Granary Building in King’s Cross. Our work was part of the silent auction section and received four bids, going eventually for £140. James and I are delighted that our map sold, and contributed to […]
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The charity auction for the artwork/map that I created with Dr James Cheshire, Data Windows, took place last night, at the Granary Building in King’s Cross. Our work was part of the silent auction section and received four bids, going eventually for £140. James and I are delighted that our map sold, and contributed to […]
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It’s always irked me slightly that many online maps of London show the various tube services as straight lines between stations, or as idealised Bezier curves. Perhaps the regimented lines and angles of the official “Beck-style” tube diagram has meant that, when translating into a “real life” geographical map, people have tended to keep the […]
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It’s always irked me slightly that many online maps of London show the various tube services as straight lines between stations, or as idealised Bezier curves. Perhaps the regimented lines and angles of the official “Beck-style” tube diagram has meant that, when translating into a “real life” geographical map, people have tended to keep the […]
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The Bow Roundabout is a busy and unpleasant junction in east London, with large volumes of traffic, including many bicycles and lorries. It forms a key part of the trunk network in London, distributing road-haulage around the city. River channels of the Lea Valley, industrial complexes, and the developing Olympic Park, block suitable alternative cycle […]
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The Bow Roundabout is a busy and unpleasant junction in east London, with large volumes of traffic, including many bicycles and lorries. It forms a key part of the trunk network in London, distributing road-haulage around the city. River channels of the Lea Valley, industrial complexes, and the developing Olympic Park, block suitable alternative cycle […]
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NYC Citibike’s meteoric rise continues – for October, the New York City bikeshare beat London’s Barclays Cycle Hire on average journeys per day, for both weekdays and weekends. Even more impressive considering that it’s only just over half the size. Thanks to this release published today at the London Data Store, and this daily updating […]
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NYC Citibike’s meteoric rise continues – for October, the New York City bikeshare beat London’s Barclays Cycle Hire on average journeys per day, for both weekdays and weekends. Even more impressive considering that it’s only just over half the size. Thanks to this release published today at the London Data Store, and this daily updating […]
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As an update to the London Cycling Census map that I mentioned in the last post, here is a map based on similar data collected by the Department of Transport during 2012. The map covers the whole of London, over 3000 datapoints – in fact the underlying data is available for the major road network […]
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As an update to the London Cycling Census map that I mentioned in the last post, here is a map based on similar data collected by the Department of Transport during 2012. The map covers the whole of London, over 3000 datapoints – in fact the underlying data is available for the major road network […]
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The London Cycling Census Map is an interactive map I’ve created, showing traffic flows on key corridors in central London. The counts were collected by Transport for London in around 170 locations, in April. TfL released some sample statistics from the dataset in a report published on their website, but the original dataset was not […]
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The London Cycling Census Map is an interactive map I’ve created, showing traffic flows on key corridors in central London. The counts were collected by Transport for London in around 170 locations, in April. TfL released some sample statistics from the dataset in a report published on their website, but the original dataset was not […]
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This is a data visualisation artwork created by Dr Cheshire (@spatialanalysis) and myself. We were invited to submit an entry to 10X10 Drawing the City London, run by the building design charity Article 25. The submissions, including various from “real” artists and architects, will then be auctioned in November to raise funds for the charity’s […]
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Well, that was good. September this year was Maptember with numerous conferences with a geographical flavour taking place in the East Midlands. The undoubted highlight for me was FOSS4G 2013, the annual conference for OSGeo which travels around the world, this year it was conveniently in Nottingham, so I was able to make it along […]
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Along with Martin Zaltz Austwick, who blogs as Sociable Physics, I led a workshop session as part of CASA’s annual conference. The topic was “Tracking, Visualising and Cycling” and focused on analysing and mapping bikeshare data. I concentrated on mapping the near-real-time docking station data, while Martin graphed journey data. Both of us used Google […]
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