US Election 2012 County-Level Results

I've been experimenting with the 2012 US election results at the county level* published on the Guardian Datablog and comparing percentages for Obama and Romney. One of the most striking things is how Obama won in DC (over 91.4% of the vote) and in the Bronx, NY (91.2%). The highest percentage for Romney was in King County, Texas where he won 95.9% of the vote. The image below shows these patterns and also includes some information on race, with % Hispanic and % African-American mirroring, to a large extent, the percentages of voters choosing Obama. It's not really that simple of course, but there is a correlation. One interesting nugget here is the difference in total votes won in counties with the highest voting percentage for each candidate. In the 5 counties with the highest Obama percentage, almost 850,000 voted for Obama. By contrast, in Romney's top 5 counties the total was just under 20,000 voting for him.

Full size version here

What does any of this mean? It means that the Republican Party probably need to think about how to do better in cities, with Hispanics and with African-Americans, but they already know that. Romney was very successful in areas where not many people live but not successful enough in major cities. It's all pretty obvious but it stands out more when you look at it on a 3D map!

*(for the continental United States, so no Alaska or Hawaii for now)

Shannon County, South Dakota: Democrat Stronghold

I've talked about 3D mapping here before, and why I like it, so I thought it was about time for another one. Since the US presidential elections have just taken place I thought I'd look at some of the data and make some maps. I'll post some more when I have time but for now I thought this 3D map showing the ratio of Obama to Romney voters at the county level was pretty interesting, not least because it identifies an interesting high point in South Dakota. 

Click here for a full screen version

South Dakota is a Republican stronghold but Shannon County is the exact opposite. In both 2004 and 2008 it had the highest Democratic voting percentage in the United States (over 85% both times) and in 2012 more than 93% voted for Obama. This might not come as a surprise when you discover that Shannon County is located entirely within the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and that out of around 8,700 registered voters, 6,500 are registered Democrats. 

One advantage of using a 3D choropleth is that you can often differentiate between places within the same class in a way that is impossible with a normal 2D choropleth. It usually makes it very easy to see places that stand about - such as Shannon County - and it is a powerful way to visualise this kind of data. There are down-sides too (visual occlusion being one of them) but the continental United States is a nice shape with nicely divided counties, so it works well there.

Beyond Shannon County, the Obama strongholds with real weight in terms of population are DC and the Bronx. In both cases Obama voters outnumbered Romney voters by more than 10 to 1 - 222,332 to 17,337 in the case of DC and 264,568 to 24,430 in the Bronx.

More on this kind of thing coming in the near future...

ESRC Success Rates 2011/12

I'm currently in the process of thinking about submitting another ESRC grant proposal. To date, I have put in a few but without success. I'm not easily discouraged though and I have had a lot of good feedback (but no money!). Thankfully, I have been able to secure funding from other sources but the vital statistics from ESRC do suggest that I might need to up my game considerably - or switch to Socio-Legal Studies! What am I talking about? Success rates of course. The LSE Impact blog just did a post on this issue and the figures really are striking. So striking, in fact, that I felt the need to turn it into a chart. Just look at the data (click charts below). 39% success rate for Socio-Legal Studies and 0% success rate for Environmental Planning (among others).

Click chart to enlarge

Click chart to enlarge

In relation to the number of submitted grants, Psychology is the clear category leader with 185, though the success rate in this category is just slightly higher than the average (16% compared to 14% average). The highest number of grants to any one category is in Sociology, with 16 awards (19% success rate) during the 2011-12 period.

See the full ESRC report here, where you can also find a break down of the figures by institution.

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.