As part of my PhD research I recently produced the map below (high res. version) that shows the diversity of surnames in Great Britain. I wanted to demonstrate that surname diversity is not uniform across Great Britain. For example towns and cities (especially London) have relatively high surname diversities compared with rural areas because more migrants and single people live in them. Wales has a very low surname diversity due to its past naming conventions. The measure used is calculated by dividing the number of surnames by the total population of each Output Area (OA). There are over 200,000 OAs in Britain. Urban OAs are very small despite accounting for a large proportion of the total population, so I have scaled the size of each OA by their population (the map is therefore a cartogram). This creates the somewhat bloated appearance of Great Britain, but serves to emphasise the increased surname diversity (due to more single people and migrants) in towns and cities. The correct shape of Great Britain is shown in the inset. For more technical info please see below.
To create this map I used ArcGIS 10 and the Cartogram Geoprocessing Tool. The nice thing about the tool is that it is not dependent on VBA and therefore worked straight off in ArcGIS 10. There are over 220,000 spatial units in this map and the tool had no problems processing them. I have not found any alternatives that work for this volume of data.
Last week I heard that the London School of Economics Geography Department was disposing of its maps and that anyone interested was free to rescue them. My first reaction was one of surprise as maps are one of the few things geographers are associated with, so it doesn’t seem right to have a geography department without a map room. My more rational side, however, understands that a change of research priorities within geography, combined with the fact that all up to date maps are now stored digitally probably means that the map room drawers have remained shut for a number of years. As universities expand there is an increasing demand for space and the “use it or lose it” policy is likely to apply.
So it fell to a number of enthusiasts to save the maps. I think the majority have been rescued and will be given new life as posters, artworks or simply keepsakes to be pulled out and admired on a rainy day. Rifling through the maps was a bit like going through an old photo album. Snapshots from the past, such as maps showing the narrow air corridor in 1970s Germany
or the size of the Haut Glacier d’Arolla glacier and famously retreating Unterer Grindelwladgletscher 75 years ago cast insights into a world before my time.
For something closer to home, I picked up some really nice maps from the “Phillips Series of Comparative Wall Atlases” (dated 1956) that show the summer and winter temperatures across the British Isles. I suspect that today we can add a couple of degrees to many of the contour lines drawn on the maps.
My favorite find is a couple of Ordnance Survey maps of the Greenwich Area dated 1917, though some lucky person had made off with the rest of London! Highlights from the maps include the “Thames Soap and Candle Works”
and detailed outlines of the housing.
If anyone knows what the colours mean I would be interested in hearing from them…
I think it is a real shame that such a great collection of maps has had to be broken up and I suspect LSE Geography will not be the last to send its maps to recycling. Still every cloud has a sliver lining and I am now trying to find the wall space to hang my newly acquired maps!
Thanks to Ollie O’Brien for the tip off about the map room giveaway.
Much of the research we do in UCL Geography and CASA relates to London. One of the most interesting aspects of the city is its growth and development (you can see changes in London’s population density here). I was therefore excited to stumble on a scanned copy of “Maps of Old London” by Geraldine Milton (1908) (pdf or archive.org link). The book contains some great maps of London dating from as far back as the 16th Century. I have included several maps from the book below.
London in 1543:
London in 1593:
London in 1658:
London in 1745:
London today (NASA ASTER image)
As I have mentioned before, archive.org provides some amazing resources for free download. I thought I would have a look to see what it had in the way of old atlases and I wasn’t disappointed. Here are a couple of my favorites: The Reynold’s Universal Atlas was published in the 19th century and includes over 400 maps an diagrams covering topics such as astronomy, vegetation, geology and the laws of matter and motion. Sadly many of the illustrations are spread over two pages but all are brilliant quality and make many of our contemporary maps appear dull by comparison. The “Tidal Chart of the World” taken from the atlas is shown below.
My second favorite is Justus Perthes’ Atlas Antiquus which is a pocket atlas of the ancient world. What is so great about this map is the fact that it has been scanned at very high resolution. The pdf is therefore >300mb! It includes some detailed maps of Rome and Athens as well as Northern Europe, North Africa, Spain and the Mediterranean. I have included the map of the UK and Ireland below. It would appear that this is part of a series of scanned atlases so there may be more to come.
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 the “Scenes from every land” series (link to one here) that contain century-old photographs from every continent. I was also amused to see an article titled “Notes about ants and their resemblance to man“. I have shared a few of my highlights here.
The top map is taken from the 1907 edition of “Scenes from Every Land”. It shows a map of the world with its key trade routes. I suspect today’s equivalent would be much more complex such is the nature of contemporary global transport.
My final two favourites are taken from the 1894 edition of the National Geographic Magazine and illustrate climatic variables for the USA. The top shows the mean temperature for the hottest 6 weeks of the year, and the lower map shows the sum of daily mean temperatures above 6 degrees. Despite their age I really like the clarity and detail in these maps.
Utilizing the same technique as the national election map, I have mapped the Local Election results for the Greater London Area at Ward level for 2006 and 2010. As before I have used RGB space to choose the final colours of each Ward based on the proportion of people voting Labour (coloured red), Other (incl. Liberal Democrats, Greens, UKIP etc) (coloured Green) and Conservative (coloured blue). So deep red Wards are strong Labour supporters, purple Wards are an even split between Labour and Conservative, grey Wards are split evenly between all three groups and greener colours suggest a decreasing dominance of the two largest parties. You can see there are subtle differences between the two years, with 2010 having colours closer to the centre of the colour triangle in many Wards, suggesting a more even split in the votes. As before I appreciate these maps are very generalised (especially if you are interested in the relative influence of the smaller parties) so Ollie O’Brien has produced a more detailed, interactive, breakdown (with the same colour scheme) here. The results were downloaded from the London Data Store.
Overview
The 2010 UK election results have been visualised in hundreds of different ways. The map below is another contribution. We have used the RGB Colour Model to create the colours. The colour model works by mixing Red, Green and Blue to produce the final colour (more details below).We have given the Conservatives blue, Labour red and all other parties (incl. Liberal Democrats, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Green Party etc) green. How red, green or blue the constituency is depends on the proportion of the vote won by each of the three groups. So dark blue’s are very Conservative, purples are Conservative/ Labour, turquoise is Conservative/ Lib Dem (and others), yellows are others/ Labour and greys represent an even split between all three groups. It is a reasonably intuitive way of getting a general impression of the views of the people of the UK, and crucially includes all the votes that get ignored when a single colour is assigned to each constituency based on the party to win the seat. It is a shame that we have to group the Lib Dems. and smaller parties together so if you are interested in the exact break down of results you can see it here.
The Details
The proportion of each colour to go into the mix is controlled by a saturation value of between 0-255. To produce this value we re-scaled the percentage of the vote won by each of the groups to a value of between 0-255. So if Labour won 100% of the vote the red value would be 255 and the green and blue values would be assigned 0. If Labour (red) won approx 50% of the vote, the other parties (green) 10 % and conservatives (blue) 40% the rgb value would be (128, 25, 102) to produce a purple colour. A three way split (85, 85, 85) would be grey. To enhance the range of colours we have stretched them out a little to make the differences a little clearer. We know there are limitations of the RGB colour model but the UK elections is one of the few examples where there are generally three possible outcomes for each constituency, so the results lend themselves to this type of visualisation.
Last Sunday I visited the Magnificent Maps Exhibition at the British Library. The exhibition has been hugely popular and I can see why- I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. The amount of information within the maps means I want to make a second visit. My favourite map overall was the Klenke Atlas for its sheer size (1.75 by 1.9 metres) and also the level of detail within its pages. The Frau Mauro World Map was one of the most interesting and it takes a while to get your head round due to its south facing orientation. Steven Walter’s “The Island” (image above) and the propaganda maps (especially the “Tea Revives the World” map) were highlights among the more contemporary maps featured.
I am not convinced that contemporary GIS will ever fully replace the beauty of hand-drawn maps. In a world full of spatial data, detailed, high quality, cartography is often put aside in preference to the speed and convenience of default colour palettes and layouts. Magnificent Maps serves as a reminder that the visual portrayal of spatial data can be just as detailed and useful on paper (or parchment in many cases) as the electronic maps we have become accustomed to.
The exhibition closes on the 19th September 2010 and there are additional events throughout the summer (more info).
What is interesting about this map (click on image above to visit interactive version) is not what it shows but what it doesn’t show. In this case it is most of the world. The entire African and South American continents are missing. This obviously directly related to the level of investment in the Winter Olympics which in turn, I suspect, is driven by the wealth of the nation and its politcal interest in winter sports- the latter perhaps ruling out many hot countries! Despite this, I think the map above is a powerful reminder that more needs to be done to create the truly global and inclusive event that the Winter Olympics claims to be.
Much of the data downloadable from London’s Data Store have a spatial dimension. Mapping this, even in the simplistic way above, should be encouraged to raise awareness of some of the stories it can (and can’t) tell about life in London. One of the most important uses I foresee for this data is in an educational context. Like never before students can access the data and use it to test concepts usually taught to them from other people’s analysis in textbooks. The map above is relatively simple to produce and already begins to tell an interesting story about the working lives of Londoners.
The map can also generate discussion about what it doesn’t show. I doubt that these statistics include many of those who are employed informally or illegally. In addition how much information has been lost when the data were aggregated to Local Authority level? I think these questions become more obvious when you begin to engage with the data through even the most basic analysis- such as producing a map. I therefore think London’s Data Store alongside the other free data websites such as data.gov.uk and the Guardian’s data store should become invaluable resources in GIS and geography education.
The statistics can be found here.
