Thanks to an Xbox Kinect, Google Earth and some programming wizardry from UCL CASA researcher George MacKerron it is now possible to fly over London. The video below shows “Pigeon Sim” which has been developed to offer a fresh way of interacting with London’s urban data. Using Peter-Pan like arm gestures (above) users can fly over London’s landmarks passing various data feeds (such as real-time tweets or travel information) as they go. Pigeon Sim is one of the most fun methods I have seen for interacting with spatial data in a long time and I can’t wait to see more of CASA’s research outputs integrated into the system. Best viewed full screen.

I have spent the last few years investigating the geography of family names (also called surnames). I work with the team who assembled the UCL Department of Geography Worldnames Database that contains the names and geographic locations of over 300 million people in nearly 30 countries (a few of these are yet to be added to the website). My research has focussed on the 152 million or so people we have data for in Europe and they all come from publicly available telephone directories or electoral rolls. I also had access to a historical dataset for Great Britain in the form of the 1881 census.  I have tried to answer two questions:

1. Is it possible to approximately establish the origin of a surname based on its modern day geographic distribution?

2. Are particular surnames more likely to be found together and if so do they form distinct geographic regions?

In the past surname research has involved  lot of manual work to create a detailed history of a particular name. With so many surnames in the database I had to think of some automated ways to do this computationally. The patterns I produce are much more generalised than the manual work- I find broad patterns rather than specific genealogical facts- but they provide useful context for population genetics, migration, historical geography and demography. If you want to find out more about this research here are titles for the papers I have had published in academic journals:

The Surname Regions of Great Britain.

Creating a Regional Geography of Great Britain Through the Spatial Analysis of Surnames.

Identifying Spatial Concentrations of Surnames.

People of the British Isles: A Preliminary Analysis of Genotypes and Surnames in a UK Control Population.

Delineating Europe’s Cultural Regions: Population Structure and Surname Clustering.

For a full list see my UCL academic profile. The left map at the top of the post is from the last paper I listed and shows how the surname regions vary across Europe. The map on the right shows how confident I am of the regions based on the number of times they emerge in the cluster analysis.

This week I feature on the 4th Episode of the Global Lab podcast. The podcast is a great new initiative led by Martin and Steve from CASA where they talk about cities, global connectivity and the impact of technology on people’s lives. Episode four features some horrendous physics jokes, Einstein’s Garden at the Green Man festival and a few minutes of me sounding a little underwhelmed about my research. You can listen here.

Here is a great opportunity to join our research group:

Summary: Creating better Area Classification for the 2011 Census of the Population

A Ph.D. studentship is available commencing end September 2010 for three years to create an updated methodology for the creation of a new area classification that will be employed on the 2011 Census of the Population, when the output data are made available. The current classification can be viewed as the ‘OAC interactive map’ at www.areaclassification.org.uk.

This provides an excellent opportunity to address a range of important methodological issues with geodemographic classifications, and to build better visualisation methods for dissemination that will maximise engagement and create more opportunities for public feedback. As such, the key research deliverables of this award will be: to evaluate alternate clustering methodologies that create more stable assignments of areas into clusters; to design new geographically sensitive methods of measurement that inform the underlying indicator variables used to create the classification; to develop and evaluate new modes of dissemination which better utilise web based technology and new advances in GIS.

The successful candidate is likely to have a background in GIS or computer science, and will have as a minimum an upper second or first class degree. S/he must also be a home/EU student for fee-paying purposes. Applicants should email a curriculum vitae and supporting statement to Professor Paul Longley at the Department of Geography, University College London: plongley@geog.ucl.ac.uk. The closing date for applications is Friday 27 August 2010, with interviews planned for the following week.

UCL Department of Geography is proud to be an ESRI Development Center (or Centre). Each year we have to submit a report that outlines the past year’s activities. We have had another busy year hosting two visiting professors (Prof. Keith Clarke and Prof. Keiji Yano), receiving over 1 million visits to our research blogs and outreach websites and helping to organize the AGI Education Keynote given by Jack Dangermond. EDC researchers have presented over 20 conference papers and published in over 20 peer reviewed journals. My own contribution is shown on this blog and my slideshare account. For those who want to know in more detail about the UCL Geography EDC activities the full report can be downloaded here.