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The Twitter Languages of London
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 ...
Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800
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 ...
Deceptive in their Beauty?
Finding ways to effectively map population data is a big issue in spatial data visualization. The standard practice uses choropleth maps that simply colour administrative units based on the combined characteristics of the people that live there (see below). These maps are popular with cartographers for a couple of reasons. You get a clear sense that the ...
London Cycle Hire and Pollution
As a cyclist in London you can do your best to avoid left turning buses and dozy pedestrians. One thing you can’t really avoid though is pollution (although I accept cyclists probably aren’t much worse off than pedestrians and drivers in this respect). To illustrate this I have taken data for 3.2 million journeys from ...
The Power of Comparison: Just How Big Is It?
If I said a country was 1594719800 metres squared it would mean a lot less to you than if I said it was about the size of Greater London (so long as you know about how big Greater London is). For this reason the media tend to report the extent of a flood in ...
Mapped: Christmas Around the World
It would be a shame to end the year without a festive map! Jack Harrison (@jacksfeed) is studying for a research masters in “Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation” at UCL. I teach on the course and it obviously hasn’t worked Jack hard enough this term as he has had time to slack off and produce ...
The Best of 2011
As 2011 draws to a close it is worth reflecting on what, I think, has been a defining year for mapping and spatial analysis. Geographic data have become open, big, and widely available, leading to the production of new and interesting maps on an almost daily basis. The increasing utilisation of technology such as Google Fusion Tables has ...
Just how far can the Tube take you?
Transport for London have just released their performance data (link here) for the London Underground network. It is in the form of a really detailed file that contains, amongst other things, the “Peak Operated Kilometres” and “Peak Passenger Journeys” for the past 6 years or so. If you total the distances covered by the Tube ...
Mapping Academic Tweets
Another day, another Twitter map- this time showing the global distribution of tweets that link to academic journal articles. I am always a bit skeptical of Twitter data (especially with location information) but as an academic seeking to publish in many of the journals that feature in people’s tweets I was prepared to make an ...
Naming Rivers and Places
A map doing the rounds at the moment (thanks to a plug from flowingdata) is Derek Watkin's brilliant map of "generic" terms for rivers in the United States (above).The map shows how different cultural and linguistic factors have influenced the naming of geographic features in the US. For example French settlers named the streams they encountered "bayous".
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Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800
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Great Maps with ggplot2
The above...
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Naming Rivers and Places
A map doing the rounds at the moment (thanks to a plug...
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The Best of 2011
As 2011...
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