SIMD2012 - An Interactive Website

With the release of the latest version of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation I thought I would take the time to put together an interactive mapping website so that people who are interested in exploring spatial patterns of deprivation could easily interact with the data. The official Scottish Government interactive mapping site has some nice features but I find it a bit cumbersome and the map interface is too small for my liking so that's why I've produced my own version, based on Google Fusion Tables.

Putting this together has prompted me to develop some additional mapping tools using Fusion Tables code and these can be accessed via the 'Tools' tab on the new website. The 'search and zoom' allows you to enter a place you want to look for and when you hit 'Search' the map immediately pans and zooms to that location.   The other tool I've created simply lets you turn the SIMD map layer on and off, which is quite a useful feature.

I've just looked at the relative ranks of places within Scotland in this site. For details of absolute change you can see the employment and income domain data available from the new SIMD 2012 website.

Deprivation in Wales

My experiments in mapping deprivation continue... I should really have done something on Wales before now but to make up for it I've done a 3D annotated map, a Google fusion table version with Welsh Index of Multiple Deprivation 2005 and 2008 data (also embedded below), plus a new version of a fusion table map with a drop-down menu for choosing local authority areas. For both the google map versions you can find out about each area just by clicking on it.

Click here for a full size version, and here's the shortened URL http://goo.gl/GYnIF

Finally, here's a screenshot of the page with the drop-down menu for selecting local authorities. You can click here, or click on the image below to go to the separate web page for this one...

Further Fusion Experiments

A short post today to report on some further experimentation with google maps, fusion tables and Scottish deprivation data. I've been exploring patterns of deprivation for a talk I'm giving at the Employment Research Institute in Edinburgh this coming week. Some results follow but in the examples below, the red areas are most deprived, yellow next most and blue less deprived. First of all we have an extract from Wick...

Then one from Inverness...

And finally one from Campbeltown...

The point here is not really to map deprivation data, though of course that's what I've been doing. Instead, it is to test the capabilities of fusion tables. More specifically, I've tried to make the data from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation from 2004, 2006 and 2009 appear in a chart when you click on an area - and I have been able to get it to work. When you click on any area in any of the maps above (best to use a full screen version), you'll see a chart in the info window that pops up, like this:

Information on how to do this can be found here. It's not that difficult but it does take a while to figure out. My view is that fusion tables are a very powerful way of visualising data and making it easily accessible online. Still in its infancy really but worth a look.