How England’s complicated political geography is confusing coronavirus rules

James Cheshire, UCL and Alex Singleton, University of Liverpool As England emerged from its second national lockdown in early December, Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, faced an onslaught of questions from MPs on both sides of the House of Commons. Each demanded clarity on what the arrangements would be for their particular constituency under…

The post How England’s complicated political geography is confusing coronavirus rules appeared first on James Cheshire.

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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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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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Mapping 5,000 Years of City Growth

I recently stumbled upon a great dataset. It’s the first to provide comprehensive data for world city sizes as far back as 3700BC. The authors (Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma & Karen Seto) write: How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did cities influence their local and regional […]

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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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Datashine: Mapping the UK Population

All the DataShine websites (except DataShine Election) are derived from a common codebase and use the OpenLayers 3 mapping platform to display a full-window slippy map, with user controls and key overlaid. DataShine Census DataShine ScotlandCommissioned by the National Records of Scotland. DataShine Commute DataShine Scotland Commute. Commissioned by the National Records of Scotland. DataShine Region […]

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