Keeping up to date with reading - my tip...

It can be very difficult keeping up to date with all the new academic literature that you may find relevant/interesting/useful. One useful tip here is to get an iGoogle account (it's very simple - see here) and then add a new tab for RSS journal feeds. After that, just go to journal home pages, copy the RSS feed address, and paste this info into the relevant RSS place in iGoogle - very simple.

This way you can keep up to date with all the journals you want to, rather than having 20 different e-mail alerts for the journals you're interested in - or however many it is. There's nothing more annoying than missing a paper that is exactly what you were looking for just because there is so much literature out there (okay, there are some things more annoying than this...). You can then check out all new articles that appear in one place and even share tabs with other iGoogle users. I've done a quick screentoaster screencast of this...

Screencasts and videos online

Flow Map Finale!

I've written quite a bit about flow mapping on these blog pages. It's only been a sideline of mine in terms of research but has consumed a lot of my time over the past year or so (well, more like three or four). So, one final image, embedded in Google Maps. This one shows gross flows of migrants between Glasgow wards from 2000 to 2001 (gross flows = two-way; that is, the total flow in both directions between two wards). Click on individual lines for more information. If you want to see the map full size in Google Maps, click the link below this smaller version and it will open.


View Larger Map

Still working on things

January has been pretty quiet on the blogging front, but that's because I've been working on papers. One of these is in revision and the other is a new piece of work based on my PhD writings (but it's taken on new life too).

Anyway, more on the former. I'm attempting to revise a paper on flow mapping and to make things more interactive and more effective so I decided that I would build a small site in google sites and then put links to content there. So, if you're at all interested in flow mapping, kml, google sites, GIS, spatial interaction or anything closely related to any of these it may be of interest. If not, it does look quite nice.

There's an introductory page, some information about the data, a few colour maps, direct links to kml files overlaid onto google maps and some links to the KML files on my web space. There's also a few words about me and about the project that all this came from. As you can see, I've also added a slightly psychedelic banner. Link to site here.


In future, I plan to blog a lot more on non-flow-mapping-related issues. It's just that for the past year or so this has been a big part of my work. That's all for now...

Google Earth API - Embed in Web Browser

With the Google Earth API, you can embed and view actual Google Earth imagery in a web browser (you'll need the plug-in). I've been doing some other work relating to dynamic mapping so was looking for ways to implement Google Earth's time lapse functionality in a web browser rather than running it via a kml/kmz file which loads into Google Earth. That's how I came across this. I put the page here rather than on the blog because I wanted it to be separate:

http://ajrae.staff.shef.ac.uk/ge1.html - if your browser says 'load failed' or something similar, just click 'Ok' and where the Google Earth image should be you can install the plug-in from there.

Here's some images:
In the image above, you can see the search box. If I enter, 'Glasgow', for example, it will automatically zoom to here:


If you have a place that occurs in more than one location, then you may have to insert a comma and then enter the city or country it is in. For example, in the image below I've searched for Hillsborough, Sheffield and it's taken me right there...

A new year, a new wordle

Spatial context (plus slideshare)

A quick post today since I'm supposed to be on 'holiday' and 'off' work. I've recently got into slideshare, for putting your PowerPoint presentations online. Very useful for conferences and even teaching too. I won't say much more than this, other than that the slides below relate to my relatively recent work on spatial context, deprivation, and area effects. Maybe I'll be back before New Year but maybe not...

Spatial Context 151208

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: deprivation spatial)

Thanks to Alex Hardman for getting me into this! Note that you can view the slides full screen by clicking the screen icon in the bottom right of the slideshare.

Simple is often better

When working with GIS boundaries, I'm often only really interested in them from a general point of view so that I can create simple choropleth maps. Also, if I'm trying to publish them over the web, there's no need to provide very accurate boundaries. Therefore, it's always useful to have different ways of simplifying boundaries. I have used various tools for this, including ET GeoWizards free tools and some of the in-built functionality of ArcGIS 9.x. However, the most convenient and flexible tool I've come across so far is MapShaper. They have an alpha testing version of their Flash-based interface here and it's really easy to use. There is a 16MB file size limit, but I've still found it to be very effective. It doesn't require much (if any) expert knowledge of GIS or of file formats, and you can simplify or smooth using a number of different methods (see images below). All in all, a very useful tool!