Digital democracy in action

A short story about digital democracy today. Anyone with an interest in politics, democracy or government will have been intrigued by the publication of the latest proposed parliamentary constituency boundaries for England. The next step would then obviously be to look more closely at the proposed changes, but how might we do this? Well, you can go to the website and look at some Excel files or some PDFs. Or, you could go to a public office and look at a map (I even took a picture of one of these - below).

The problem here of course is that it is 2012 and most people might like to have a nice interactive, user-friendly map to look at which allows them to zoom into their area to see how the changes affect them. But this wasn't produced by the Boundary Commission for England. Instead - just like last time - a user-friendly interactive map has been produced by expert-enthusiasts, if I might call them that. The one I did was just a quick overnight project and although the new version is much nicer than my one it was still not produced by the people who actually should have done it. The O'Brien/Cheshire version is covered in the Guardian DataBlog and you can see from the comments that it allows people to understand in fine detail how the proposals might affect them.

Why does any of this even matter? It matters because changing parliamentary constituency boundaries is a key aspect of our democratic system and the people who represent us in parliament are tied to individual areas. Changes in these areas are not trivial and we need to be able to understand - in as much detail as possible - how proposed changes will impact upon us. It is also imperative that as many people as possible are able to see the new proposals. Publishing them in PDFs, Excel and in hard copy in a number of locations is okay but it falls well short of what we ought to expect. It shouldn't be left to mapping experts to produce interactive maps - even if it is quite enjoyable making them!

Using the current/proposed slider on the new map I can tell within 10 seconds that if the proposals go ahead I may very well have a new MP. With the spreadsheets, PDFs and hard copy map this is just not possible. Time for the Boundary Commission for England to revisit their approach in my opinion.

Data visualisation at datavisualization.ch

With so many different maps, infographics and other types of visualisations appearing on the web each day, it can be difficult for those interested in the visual display of quantitative information to keep up with the tools of the trade. Thankfully, the people at Datavisualization.ch in Switzerland have put together a selection of the most powerful and useful tools currently available (see image below). 

The datavisualization.ch examples page

Click on any of the images and you'll see the flipcard format in action, whereby the image flips round and tells you where you can find out more about that particular image, tool and further technical information.

They included an example from Google Fusion Tables that I developed for a newspaper here in the UK but more interestingly they have highlighted a whole range of tools that are either quite new and unknown (e.g. CartoDB) or more for technical experts (e.g. data.js). However, there are tools here that anyone can use - even those with no technical knowledge (e.g. Google Chart Tools). Thanks to Alex Ghita for pointing this out to me.

So, definitely worth a look. I should also add that this is quite similar in nature to the examples provided in a joint CLG/OCSI project a couple of years ago which produced the DataViz pages - in relation to improving data visualisation for the public sector.

What happens when you blog?

I began this blog back in 2008 without knowing much about what I'd say or what it would become. Tech guru Alex Hardman said it would be a great idea for me to start a blog since I seemed to do a lot of visual stuff in my work. So I began blogging and decided from the start to just post what I wanted and to see where it took me. I thought I'd share a bit about my blogging experience just to demonstrate that it's not all a pointless navel-gazing exercise...

I'll start in July 2012 when I received an e-mail from legendary US-Swiss geographer Waldo Tobler saying that he noticed my map and work in the Economist (above). The June 30th edition had a special London supplement and they had asked me a little about my work on deprivation in London because they'd previously seen my work in The Guardian. I'd done a bit of work for The Guardian because Simon Rogers, the datablog editor-in-chief and all-round data journalism pioneer had seen some of my earlier work about deprivation on this blog. He'd simply contacted me to ask if I could help them get some online maps together for the release of the 2010 English Indices of Deprivation.

I started blogging about deprivation because that has been one part of my academic work for a while and there was tons of stuff (mainly maps, visuals and technical stuff) that I had produced but which would most likely never see the light of day again - and certainly not in an academic paper. Putting it on this blog means it can reach a wider audience and, more importantly, help connect me with others who have similar interests.

So, one very positive aspect of blogging (for me) has been that some of my academic-related work that would not otherwise be very widely read (i.e. it only appears in academic journals!) can reach a much wider audience. My view here is that if we're writing stuff as academics then surely we want people to read it. The blog gets somewhere in the region of 1,500-3,000 visits per month but this has taken a long time to develop. However, even when it was only getting 300 visits that meant I could still reach a much wider audience than writing academic papers alone.

The only thing that you need to do to keep the blog going is content, and that takes time so it is a bit of a commitment but I try to make my posts short and quite visual because reading from screens is just not as pleasant an experience as reading from paper. To my amazement people actually do find stuff I write and quite frequently they get in touch and we become collaborators - in a way that would not have happened had I not been blogging.

These are just a few examples of the type of things that have happened when I've been blogging. I'm sure others have had similar experiences. I'm not sure if it helps that my blog has a stupid name that I probably wish I'd never given it (!) but I try not to take myself too seriously so have not bothered changing it. At least people seem to remember it...

About the Green Belt

Last week I did a short piece for the Guardian about the lack of an open map of England's green belt. This morning CPRE published a map and short briefing about the green belt being under threat (extract below). There is a national PDF map and a more detailed briefing about particular examples but there is still no way to zoom in to local areas to see it in more detail. 

The map also cites the source of the data - not the government - so that's why it can't be open and shared. I think this is a bad situation but I've said that already. I just can't believe that such an important national dataset is not in the public domain. Rant over. Nice work from CPRE though. 

Is there a link between closed green belt data and attempts to open up the green belt for development? Probably not, but there might be a relationship between the two.

The Petermann Iceberg

There's a big story in the news today about an iceberg that has broken away from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland. These things are always compared to real places in order to provide context and this case is no different. The BBC reported that the iceberg is 'twice the size of Manhattan'. This is big, but exactly how big is it? It's roughly 100 square miles. That's the same size as Edinburgh. But how big is that? To answer these questions I've just modified an earlier image based on the size of UK cities (local authority boundaries) to put it in context. Put simply, this iceberg is bigger than Bristol, it's bigger than Cardiff, it's bigger than Manchester. It's just big. Click the image below to see for yourself.

How Big is Beijing?

I was in Beijing recently for a conference and was astonished by the scale and intensity of the city. I found it a little difficult to get my head round the sheer size of Beijing so I thought I'd do a little comparison between Beijing and London. 'Beijing' here refers to the municipality of Beijing (i.e. the Province-level city) and 'London' refers to the 32 Boroughs + City of London which make up Greater London. I've illustrated this in the graphic below, which maps Beijing and Greater London at the same scale. As you can see, Beijing is much bigger - both in terms of area and population.

Click here to see the full size version.

Key facts: Beijing is, area-wise, more than ten times bigger than Greater London. It has a population of 19.6 million, compared to about 7.8 million for Greater London. This comparison is of course not really fair because Beijing includes several large rural areas. A better comparison is to look at the Inner Districts of Beijing since these cover an area quite similar to Greater London (1,377 vs 1,572 sq. km. respectively). In this comparison Beijing has 11.7 million people compared to London's 7.8 million. No matter how you look at it, though, Beijing is 'big'! If you're interested in another comparison, take a look at Oliver O'Brien's comparison of Tokyo and London...

Why I Like 3D Maps

I do quite a bit of spatial analysis and mapping in my academic research, and some of it ends up on this blog. Over the past few years I've done quite a few 3D* maps - most recently one of population density in China. A comment by map-guru James Cheshire made me think about the 3D issue, hence this post, which attempts to say a little more about why I like using the third dimension, as it were. Also, there's not much about this stuff online at present. The two images below show population density in Europe at NUTS3 level, with a colour scale running from red (high density) to blue (low density). Click the images to enlarge.

*N.B. Data for some parts of Italy, Germany, and the UK are missing, 

but that doesn't matter for now - this is just an example.

The reason I like the addition of the third dimension with this kind of dataset is that you can tell more about the differences between areas within the same statistical category. Essentially, it adds an additional dimension of information that you can not observe from the conventional 2D map above. This is particularly true of the most high density areas in the first map. There is of course an issue here about the relative size of areas and how this might change the population density of different places but that is a different matter since I'm not in control of NUTS3 definitions! For more on this kind of thing I'd recommend looking at Stan Openshaw's work and for more on the utility (or futility?) of choropleths generally Tobler (1973) is an excellent starting point. Gale and Halperin (1982) is also worth a look.

If we assume that the main purpose of a choropleth map is to present and discover spatial patterns then there is sometimes a strong case for using the vertical dimension and extruding polygons using a z-variable (I do this in ArcScene, in case anybody is interested). However, there are some complications and I don't think it is always appropriate to go 3D. For example, depending upon the spatial structure of your data extruded polygons in one area can obscure those in another. There is also the issue of the different size of areas and the way these might have an impact upon the level of extrusion - i.e. if we used 1km cells for the European population density map it would look rather different in 3D - though this is possibly another artifact of the modifiable areal unit problem, as described by Openshaw. I've patched together three different examples from my blog in the image below, just for comparison. Another option would be to follow the example of Ben Hennig and produce population-weighted cartograms.

When I produce these 3D maps (or visualisations) I'm not trying to create a geographically precise rendering of space but rather I'm attempting to draw attention to variations in a dataset in a way which 2D maps can only do to a limited degree. They are abstractions and simplifications but in terms of understanding the world I find it can be an improvement. There is a little bit about it in this Environment and Planning B paper I wrote but I plan to write more about this in the near future (the'near future' in geological terms of course). 

*Also known as 2.5D in the GIS world, but I'll put that to one side for now...