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.
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.
I hadn’t seen this video before. It demonstrates one of the earliest attempts at automated cartography for the display of temporal spatial data. 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 Regional Research Institute. The visualisation was produced with the synergraphic mapping system (SYMAP) developed by Howard Fisher in the mid 1960s. More details and a fully downloadable version can be found here. A presentation on SYMAP is available here. The sequence starts with a slow version of two minutes forty-five seconds before repeating the sequence more rapidly in forty-five seconds, and finally in five seconds.
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.
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.
***Not long after posting this, the “The Look of Maps” appears to have been removed from archive.org”***
ESRI Press have announced they will be re-printing Arthur H. Robinson’s classic book “The Look of Maps: An Examination of Cartographic Design“. The book begins with the following quote from William Morris Davis:
“It is just as important to study the proper and effective use of various forms of graphic presentation, as it is to study the values of different methods, treatments, grades, and forms of verbal presentation”.
This quote, like much of the advice in the book, remains as relevant today as it did 50 years ago. I think it is great that ESRI Press are investing in re-printing “classic” works as it is often nice to own them as a printed version. However, books are expensive, especially if you are a cash strapped student and there is a free alternative available. In this case the book can be freely downloaded from archive.org. Download Link. Archive.org is a great resource and I am sure there are many hidden gems on there to be discovered.
Embedded below is my presentation to the British Cartographic Society’s Annual Conference 2010, held in Nottingham. You will find high resolution versions of many of the maps featured in the presentation available for download on this blog.
Cities are one of the many phenomena that follow a long-tailed distribution. In simple terms there are a few big cities and lots of small ones. The classic way of showing a long tailed distribution (and the method from which the name is taken) is to produce as plot such as that below:
The infographic at the top of the post by chinfographics.com demonstrates the distribution in a more engaging and constructive way.
One method I have used in the past to demonstrate data with a long tailed distribution is the excellent Wordle tool. I have created a Wordle (below) for the same data (downloaded from Chinfographics). Whilst it does not compete with the Chinfographics infographic in terms of quality, I still think Wordles provide a very simple, and effective, method of displaying data with a “long tail”.
