The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
It’s been very quiet over Easter and I’ve been meaning to look at 3D visualisation of geographic data for a while. The aim is to build a framework for visualising all the real-time data we have for London without using Google Earth, Bing Maps or World Wind. The reason for doing this is to build …
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Last week I ran an introductory workshop on the analysi […]
Continue reading »MapThing allows you to perform a range of useful mapping (in the geographical sense) functions within Processing and offers a collection of classes for reading ESRI-compliant Shape files (a.k.a. shapefiles), CSV point data, and GPX files, and then displaying them … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Note: this was previously posted at simulacra.info, but I am in the process of (re)organising my technical notes and tutorials. After giving up on Gephi (again, I really should learn), I decided it was time to get to grips with … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Following the interest in our Twitter Tongues map for L […]
Continue reading »One of the most recognisable visualisation techniques used by LSE Cities in the Urban Age publications is the 3D density map- an intuitive and engaging way to represent built form, and enable comparison of very different city environments across the globe. I’ve been producing 3D density maps in my own research for around five years … Continue reading →
**Update: You can see a new fully-interactive ve […]
Continue reading »Alison Heppenstall, Gordon Mitchell, Malcolm Sawyer (LUBS) and I have been awarded an 18 month grant by the ESRC through their secondary data analysis initiative. Titled ‘Geospatial Restructuring of Industrial Trade’ (GRIT), the motivation for the grant came from a deceptively simple question: what happens to the spatial economy when the costs of moving goods …
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After giving up on Gephi (again, I really should learn), I decided it was time to get to grips with Python and iGraph since I really need to produce multiple iterations of a graph. The matmos at CASA have, of course, been touting Python for ages, but I’ve just not had the time/incentive to install […]
Continue reading »As the costs of recent droughts spiral from USA to Australia, West Africa to India, we’re getting a taste of what a significantly warmer climate would be like. Critically as the scientific evidence mounts up that climate change is occurring, global carbon dioxide emissions are soaring. Why is this? I’ve designed a new website Carbon … Continue reading →
This article is the first of a few I hope to write about visualisation and Processing, a graphics tool created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas back in 2001. In this one I’ll introduce Processing and get into some hard-core navel-gazing about visualisation. Next time I’ll look at ways to use the Processing library as …
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Of all the different types of data visualisation, maps* […]
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I recently attended the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) 5th Research Methods Festival. Researchers from the Talisman project presented in a few different sessions, presenting cutting edge work on methods for collecting data (with a focus on new crowd-sourced data) as well as methods for spatial modelling, simulation and policy analysis. All of the … Read more →
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The Olympics are in town and about to kick off tonight in a packed Olympic Stadium out in Stratford. The last week was all about gearing up to for London to this big event. There were a few new changes, including the Olympic lanes for official traffic,…
Continue reading »The Olympics are in town and about to kick off tonight in a packed Olympic Stadium out in Stratford. The last week was all about gearing up to for London to this big event. There were a few new changes, including the Olympic lanes for official traffic,…
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The Olympics are in town and about to kick off tonight in a packed Olympic Stadium out in Stratford. The last week was all about gearing up to for London to this big event. There were a few new changes, including the Olympic lanes for official traffic,…
Continue reading »The first time I saw a tube map of London was a long time before I actually ever went there. It was during my one summer living in downtown Toronto with a bunch of crazy girls. One of the saner ones had a poster of the tube on her bedroom wall. It was from the Tate … Read more →
Continue reading »Maps have always been a powerful way of highlighting L […]
Continue reading »Every so often you come across a dataset that really amazes you in its richness and ability to change perspectives on understanding the world. One such dataset has been produced by academics at Stanford and Oslo tracing the global supply chain of CO2 emissions. Traditionally emissions are attributed to countries depending on where fuels are … Continue reading »
I recently co-wrote an editorial (download the full ver […]
Continue reading »When was the last time you held a paper map? I don̵ […]
Continue reading »There have been some wonderful flow maps appearing online recently, such as Paul Butler’s global…
Continue reading »The map above shows the routes flown by the top 7 airli […]
Continue reading »As part of the MRes of Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation in CASA, the course has been exploring various techniques relevant to urban modelling and visualisations, such as Cellular Automata and (CA), Agents Based Modelling. These approac…
Continue reading »CASA researchers were out in force at the AUM 2012 meeting in Cambridge last week,…
Continue reading »An interesting movie is currently trending visualising the last thousand years of European history and conflict. Europe resembles a large game of Risk or Civilization. Such games typically end with a single large empire, whilst the dynamics of European history show the larger empires forming only fleetingly, soon to be dissolved by the re-emergence of […]
Continue reading »Taschen’s Information Graphics book is the most compreh […]
Continue reading »Blood is everywhere when it comes to describing cities. We have arterial roads, pulsing transport flows, and cities with different metabolisms. Thanks to great new datasets and visualisation software the analogy of cities with pulsing flows is being increasingly utilised for explanatory mapping. For example the work of UCL CASA’s Jon Reades above depicts the London Underground network …
Continue reading »As I get to better grips with the full richness of the Oyster data set and the complexity of the TfL network it’s gradually getting easier to build better visualisations. One of the ones that I’ve wanted to revisit for quite some time was my original ‘pulse of the city’ animation (you can see it […]
Continue reading »I’ve been meaning to post this for ages but have had a great deal on my plate (more posts and visualisations to follow in the next week I hope) so this has kept slipping, together with the six or seven other ‘draft’ posts I’ve got going. Anyway, this visualisation shows average entries at each and every Underground, […]
Continue reading »I recently had the pleasure of presenting at the first Data Visualisation London Meetup event where I spoke about some of work we do at UCL CASA. A fair chunk of the slides were movies so I thought it best to stick them in a blog post. If you like what you see you can …
Continue reading »CASA hosted a very successful Smart Cities event last Friday, including presentations from Carlo Ratti,…
Continue reading »Last year Eric Fischer produced a great map (see below) visualising the language communities of Twitter. The map, perhaps unsurprisingly, closely matches the geographic extents of the world’s major linguistic groups. On seeing these broad patterns I wondered how well they applied to the international communities living in London. The graphic above shows the spatial …
Continue reading »Stamen Design are a bespoke design and technology compa […]
Continue reading »I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands) sailing between 1750 and 1850. The creation of this dataset was completed as part of the Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 (CLIWOC) project. The routes are plotted from the …
Continue reading »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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