The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
In sync on the dot with the beat, goes the graphic as the beautifully melancholic song by James Blake drags on. Its fascinating to watch the transformation of form, shape and colour in tune with a very rhythmic pice of music. This is nice because of i…
Continue reading »With the increasingly widespread availability of transport data, we can now visualise and explore new dynamic geographies of urban transport flows and networks. In this post, I show detailed animations of UK multi-modal public transport networks using timetable data. This …
Continue reading »Some of the most popular posts on spatialanalysis are about typographic maps. I thought it would be cool to put together some of my favourite’s for London. Click on each…
Continue reading »Migrations of people have existed for millennia and occur at a range of scales and time-periods (from small-scale journeys to work through to intercontinental resettlement). As a geographer I have long been interested in these and thought it was about time I mapped them! Using data from the Global Migrant Origin Database (thanks Adam for the tip) …
Continue reading »This is another great map animation from our friends in CASA. It is a year old now (almost to the day) but it remains one of the most engaging Twitter…
Continue reading »How do terms compare in usage over the centuries. With the Ngram Viewer now available on the Google Labs the massive stock of scanned books as part of the Google Book project becomes available for search. It allows for the graphing of terms according t…
Continue reading »There are a lot of hidden treasures to be found in the city. Being this some historic relicts, a great view across to a place all of a sudden becoming a landmark or a lovely coffee place. One can also find inspiration, patience or pleasure in many ways…
Continue reading »Australia has only just recently suffered the worst flooding in years, with large areas of the East Coast under water. Brisbane was hit very hard with high waterlevels over days. ABC-News has put together a coverage story showing in detail the impact o…
Continue reading »Flattening the Earth so that it can be easily drawn on a 2-dimensional surface is complicated. Over many years map projections have been developed to aid in this process, but they can only really estimate (albeit very accurately) the shape and dimensions of things on the Earth’s round surface. Whilst it is important to understand …
Continue reading »Another brilliant visualisation from UCL’s CASA, this time from Anil Bawa-Cavia. It visualises trips made on the London Underground using data gathered from Oyster Cards. Each trail is a single trip between a…
Continue reading »The future is probaby the topic of the month here. Not only on the blog but deeper. We started the last week already with a vision of the future, so it goes in the tradition to continue on this. Was the ‘We are the Future’ a more social one, this one h…
Continue reading »Recently, BBC Look East have been running a “Broadband Speed Survey”, asking people to use an online tester to check their broadband speed, and then enter the value, along with their postcode, into SurveyMapper. This generated 16,311 responses to the survey, but for each response people get to view the map containing the latest data, […]
Continue reading »Following my previous post I have been digging around archive.org for interesting spatial/ geographical related resources. A search for “geographic” yielded a number of back issues of the National Geographic Magazine. They date back as far as 1888 and contain some great images and maps. There are some real gems to be had, such as …
Continue reading »If you lack a sense of direction and resort to writing directions on scraps of paper or the palm of your hand, this glove is for you. It was designed…
Continue reading »I hadn’t seen this video before. It demonstrates one of the earliest attempts at automated cartography for the display of time with spatial data. Truly ground breaking, the video shows the urban growth of Lansing at 5 yearly intervals from between 1850 and 1965 and was produced by Allan Schmidt at the Michigan State University Urban …
Continue reading »News media coverage on the Afganistan War, started in 2001 and the Iraq War started back in 2003 by the then President of america, George W. Bush has slowly but surely been pushed of the headlines. It was big back then and still is every now and then, …
Continue reading »Graffiti artist Marc C. Woehr and Interaction Designer Achim Kern have collaborated on this project to augment graffiti using light. The installation with the title ‘The City Never Sleeps’ features a Woehr drawing and uses projection to light paint int…
Continue reading »Talking cycles and repetition, this is probably the most prominent example everybody remembers from primary school, the water cycle. The rain comes down over the mountains filters through the stone, a spring, a creek, a river, a stream into the ocean, …
Continue reading »Buried in the London Datastore are the population estimates for each of the London Boroughs between 2001 – 2030. They predict a declining population for most boroughs with the exception of a few to the east. I was surprised by this general decline and also the numbers involved- I expected larger changes from one year to …
Continue reading »The release of the R package “googleVis” has made the production of interactive maps through Google’s Chart Tools a simple task. Ignoring the some basic data manipulation the below map was produced with these two lines of code: library(googleVis) Geo=gvisGeoMap(Map, locationvar=”Country”, numvar=”Percentage”, options=list(height=350, dataMode=’regions’)) plot(Geo) This map, although simple to produce, is nontrivial as it …
Continue reading »Some of us at CASA can’t get enough of the Barclay’s Cycle Hire data. We have had Ollie‘s hugely successful flow maps, journey time heat maps, and now the the Sociable Physicist himself, Martin Austwick has created this stunning animation of the bikes. The TFL data release contained the start point, end point, and duration for around …
Continue reading »One of the maps that I liberated from the great LSE clearout sometime ago was this visually pleasing and well balanced representation of the ratio of Females to Males from the 1961 Census. This kind of map has a specific story to tell, announcing that for a long time the women and men in the […]
Continue reading »There’s an increasing amount of useful packages that allow for spatial analysis in python. Having said that, actually drawing a map remains relatively tricky, here I am sharing a few of the methods that I have come up with recently to help in this area. Firstly, let’s consider the basic set of prerequisites that you […]
Continue reading »We’ve just updated the MapTube website with a new release of the software that makes all of the Census maps clickable. Anything tagged with the “CENSUS2001″ keyword is clickable, as well as most of the maps made from the data on the London DataStore. The new clickable map icon. This is used to turn the clickable maps feature […]
Continue reading »Using the General Election 2010 results spreadsheet from the Guardian Data Blog, we’ve produced three MapTube maps showing the distribution of votes for the three main parties: The maps can be viewed on MapTube at the following link: http://www.maptube.org/election/map.aspx?s=DGxUpxGSnLKhUzLIOMHBwKeUwKZUyEDAwcCnksCjlMhBwMHAp5LAoTbd Use the red slider buttons to fade the distributions for the three parties up and down. […]
Continue reading »With 649 of the 650 parliamentary seats from the 6th May 2010 General Election now declared, we can see how the policital map of the UK has changed. The one remaining seat is Thirsk and Malton where the death of one of the candidates means that the vote has been postponed until 25th May. This map has been […]
Continue reading »There has been quite a lot of interest about using Twitter to crowd source snow amounts, but I couldn’t help wondering how this compares to the data available from the Met Office observing network. Over the period from 20 December 2009 to 15 January 2010 I downloaded the synoptic information from the Department of Atmospheric […]
Continue reading »While playing around with 3DS Max 2009 for some of our GENeSIS work, I happened to notice that it’s now possible to use .net assemblies in MaxScript. My first thought was to use this for some of our agent based modelling work, but when Fabian Neuhaus asked about importing GPX files, I saw a really easy way of […]
Continue reading »Crowd, transport and urban simulations are at their roots down to ‘Agents’ or ‘Objects’ that are assigned a set of rules as to how to moves in relation to both the environment and other agents around them. 3D Studio Max has a built in ‘Crowd and Delegate’ system which can be used to assign behaviour […]
Continue reading »It’s actually a stacked bar chart rather than a traditional population pyramid, but the image below shows male/female population by age for all the output areas in England. The red thematic overlay is total population for every OA, which can be clicked to get the age group breakdown shown in the popup window. This map […]
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