Sound maps are nothing new but they are becoming increasingly popular as technology (such as Google Maps and Audioboo) are making their creation much easier. My interest in these stems from the Sounds Like Leigh-On-Sea project my brother is creating of our hometown (map below).
View Sounds Like Leigh-on-Sea in a larger map
There are several other larger-scale projects that have caught my eye recently. The London Sound Survey is one of the most mature projects with sounds from most of London, and recent plans to expand east along the Thames Estuary.
On a National Scale the Noise Futures Network and British Library have teamed up to create the UK Soundmap with the intention of creating a crowd-sourced soundscape of the UK. It has only recently been launched so there is space for many more contributions!
One of my favorite maps is from sonicwonders.org with its “travel guide to sonic wonders‘. Sounds can be rated as ‘worth a journey’, ‘worth a detour’ and ‘interesting’ and it can certainly add another dimension to holiday plans.
Worthy of a final mention is the BBC’s Audio Map of the World because it is the most extensive I have seen (it even has recordings from Antarctica!).
I think sound maps are yet to come of age. It would be nice to see the large scale creation of georeferenced sound recordings uploaded online in a similar way that photos are on Flickr. I think they could make for a really interesting data source and could produce some great maps and applications.
This past week I have come across a few original interpretations of Harry Beck’s classic London Underground Map. The Threadless clothing website has thrown up a couple. The first is of my favorites and is a Middle Earth Metro map.
The second from threadless is a map of the Metropolitan Cardiac Authority Transport Routes:
Continuing the biology them I stumbled across the entire human body represented as a tube map on the Creativelabs blog.
I will end on a nice visualization of the London Tube map produced by colleagues over at DigitalUrban:
For the past few days I have been taking screen shots of Oliver O’Brien’s hugely popular London Cycle Hire Status Map. How the map works is explained on Ollie’s blog. I have picked 24 hours (from midnight Tuesday 10th to midnight Wednesday 11th) to demonstrate the flows of people in and out of London. Nothing much happens in the early hours, then the dots come alive in the centre as people start to flood in and fill up the stations. Things stay reasonably constant throughout the day until rush hour in the afternoon when the red stations in the centre of London become blue as people use the bikes to get home. Each second of the video= 1 hour in the day.
Embedded below is a high resolution version of John Snow’s 1854 map of the Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) cholera outbreak. Widely cited as the one of the first (and arguably best) examples of using spatial analysis in epidemiological studies, Snow’s map holds a special place in the hearts of those using spatial analysis to improve people’s lives.
About the map: I found this map on the UMapper website and am therefore indebted to andreit for uploading it. Each black bar on the map represents a death from cholera and these can be clearly seen to cluster around the pump (red dot). A much more detailed explanation is provided by the UCLA Department for Epidemiology.
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.
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.
Alongside its forthcoming Magnificent Maps Exhibition (30th April 2010- 19th September 2010), the British library is running a series of talks related to maps. I have gone through its events listings and pulled out the ones that may be of most interest to those interested in maps and their uses.
2nd May 1600: Unveiling of the Big Kings Cross Map. Details.
2nd May at various times: “This Disgraceful Location”: Revealing Kings Cross through maps. There are two walks and a talk associated with this. Details.
I have just discovered the amazing visualisations produced for the BBC’s Britain from Above series. I have embedded some of my favourites- much of the data were collated and provided by CASA- see Digital Urban for details . The taxis in London (above) create a fantastic impression of the diurnal rhythms within the city. The air traffic over Britain animation (below) is just as impressive. I was especially taken by the amount of “stacking” that takes place over British airports.
The final is, for me, the most powerful as it illustrates just how important long distance communication has become:
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.
I frequently use R (a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics) for data analysis. As almost all my data are spatial it is often good to produce a map of the results without having to export the data into another GIS package. I am often asked how to do this so I have included here the code I used to create the map you see below. It should be quite straightforward to substitute my data with your own shapefile and alter some of the parameters such as the colour and the break points to produce your own map. For those interested in more advanced spatial analysis with R I recommend this book.
