Failure is part of the visualization process

It can be hugely frustrating and even debilitating at those times when you feel unable to wrangle the data you need to create the graphic you had in mind. But failure is an important part of the creative process.

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Next slide please: what’s wrong with the UK government’s coronavirus charts

“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” If you watched the UK government’s COVID-19 briefing to announce and England-wide lockdown, you might have been reminded of this quote by Harry S Truman. Following slide after slide of maps and charts, there was growing frustration about the way nationally important statistics were being presented to the…

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Point Pattern Analysis using Ecological Methods in R

Here is a quick example for how to get started with some of the more sophisticated point pattern analysis tools that have been developed for ecologists – principally the adehabitathr package – but that are very useful for human data. Ecologists deploy point pattern analysis to establish the “home range” of a particular animal based […]

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The Ultimate Gift List for Map Lovers

Here’s my 2017/2018 Ultimate Gift List for Map Lovers! All the recommendations are for products I own – or have seen – and can genuinely endorse. I’ve listed them under broad categories of people you might want to buy them for. Hopefully they cater for a range of map-related interests and budgets. Enjoy! For those who […]

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London’s Population Profile in 1935

The graphic below shows the population of London across a number of transects overlain on the city’s underlying terrain. It was produced by Ordnance Survey in 1935 and is one of the few early examples I’ve seen of the organisation producing “data visualisations” alongside their famous maps (they do a lot more of this now […]

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Map Projections

I’ve just discovered this really lovely graphic detailing a number of different map projections. It’s taken from the opening pages of the “Oxford Advanced Atlas” (Bartholomew, 1936) and features well-known projections such as the Mercator and Mollweide, through to the more obscure Van der Grinten, and the heart shaped Bonne. It even features the gores required […]

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Joy Division, Population Surfaces and Pioneering Electronic Cartography

There has been a resurgence of interest in data visualizations inspired by Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover. These so-called “Joy Plots” are easier to create thanks to the development of the “ggjoy” R package and also some nice code posted using D3. I produced a global population map (details here) using a similar technique in 2013 and since […]

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Roger Tomlinson’s PhD: The first in GIS

The late Roger Tomlinson is considered the “Father of Geographic Information Systems” and he completed his PhD in the UCL Department of Geography in 1974. Tomlinson pioneered digital mapping – every map created using a computer today still uses the principles he laid down in his thesis and its associated work creating the “The Canada Geographic […]

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Population Lines: How and Why I Created It

Thanks to the power of Reddit the “Population Lines” print (buy here) I created back in 2013 has attracted a huge amount of interest in the past week or so (a Europe only version made by Henrik Lindberg made the Reddit front page). There’s been lots of subsequent discussion about it’s inspiration, effectiveness as a form of […]

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Big Data and Design: More Baboon, Less Unicorn

I recently had the pleasure of giving a Creative Mornings talk. Each month there is a new theme that the presenters need to refer to – mine was “fantasy” so I chose to open with one of my favourite fantasy creatures: the unicorn. It’s a talk about the creative process behind Oliver Uberti and I’s […]

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7 Deadly Sins of (Academic) Data Visualisation

I was recently asked to deliver a days training on scientific data visualisation. I spent a while scanning through papers to pull out what I see as the “7 deadly sins” of academic data visualisation (there are probably many more) . These sins are rooted in a lack of time and training, an underestimation of the importance […]

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Mapping (historic) tracks in ggplot2

This tutorial was first published in “Geocomputation a Practical Primer“. Here is a more complex example showing how to produce a map of 18th Century Shipping flows. The data have been obtained from the CLIWOC project and they represent a sample of digitised ships’ logs from the 18th Century. We are using a very small […]

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Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking Visualisation

Last week I attended the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference and heard a talk by Robert Groves, Director of the US Census Bureau. Aside the impressiveness of the bureau’s work I was struck by how Groves conceived of visualisations as requiring either fast thinking or slow thinking. Fast thinking data visualisations offer a clear message without the need …

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