Employment Deprivation in England and Scotland

I'm doing a talk today at the Employment Research Institute in Edinburgh, so I thought I'd put my presentation here and also post a few nuggets of information. Employment deprivation is the subject of the talk and I've been exploring spatial patterns in relation to this. What is 'employment deprivation'? It's involuntary exclusion from the labour force.

A few bits of information... Out of the different indices of deprivation for England and Scotland between 2004 and 2010, the highest figure for employment deprivation was in a LSOA in Rochdale, with 75% of people out of work. The highest figure in Scotland was a Data Zone in Glasgow in 2004 and one in Edinburgh in 2006 with 65% of working age people not in work. There are no major surprises in the general spatial pattens but there are interesting findings in the spatial analysis in the presentation (well, that's what I think).

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.

The Voting Decision in a Spatial Context

In much of my recent work I've been interested in the concept of spatial context and the idea that what happens in one area influences nearby areas (cf. Waldo Tobler). There are many different areas of research related to this but two of them are political geography and spatial statistics. So, with the recent AV vote in the UK, I thought I'd see if there were any contextual effects with the voting. This map of London is the result of some quick analysis I did...

The important thing here is not the overall result (an emphatic 'No' to AV), but the manner in which the 'Yes' vote is spatially clustered. Early work on this kind of thing was pioneered by Kevin Cox in the late 1960s and later by Ron Johnston. I just thought I'd play around with the data to see what it looked like on the map.

Deprivation and Map Distortion (SIMD 2009)

I'm doing a seminar at the Employment Research Institute in Edinburgh later this month on the topic of employment deprivation in England and Scotland. Recent posts have mostly been about England and patterns of deprivation there and I've been neglecting my native land. So, I thought I would use some of the data to take a look at patterns of deprivation in Scotland using a population-weighted cartogram. The result is below (click to view full size).

Now I need to get on with some more in-depth analysis of employment data...

Google Fusion Tables

A short post today about the wonderful Google Fusion Tables. It may sound baffling, but Fusion Tables are basically a service (provided by Google, obviously) that allows you to manage and map large databases 'in the cloud', as they say. In plain speak, you can upload large tables of data and display them and map them and share them. For someone like me who is into mapping data, this is great because all you need to do is get your data into kml format. This can be done with normal GIS software like ArcGIS but the best way I have found is to use shpescape.



The example above is just something I created a couple of years ago in ArcGIS and then recently uploaded to Fusion Tables. It's a 'tile finder' for Ordnance Survey data so you can figure out which 20km tile you need to get based on which area you are interested in. This is not the point here though - I'm just showing how you can get data into google map format very easily.

If you work with lots of data on a regular basis - and particularly any mappable data - you should take a look at Fusion Tables...

The IMD in 3D

Before I move on from experimenting with the deprivation data from the new English Indices of Deprivation I thought I'd do a 3D version, just for fun. The images below are the results of my experiments. The first image has labels for various places. The second image does not and is also at a higher resolution.



When you add a third dimension certain places stand out more (e.g. coastal areas) but there is a balance to be struck here, as always... That's enough IMD mapping for now!

The Domains of the IMD

What most people look at when they see the Indices of Deprivation is the combined Index of Deprivation score and rank for each area. I do this too, but it's always interesting to examine the individual domains to see how areas rank and what the spatial patterns look like. So, time for a map on all of this... (click to enlarge)

In the above image, you'll see that I've produced a raster map for each of the different domains of the English IMD 2010 and that each is sized according to the percentage weighting it gets in the final IMD. There are some interesting differences between domains which, by the way, are covered in Chapter 3 of the technical report.

Income and employment account for nearly half of the weighting for the final IMD score so these maps look pretty similar to the overall IMD map but there are interesting differences with other domains, in particular Barriers to Housing and Services. This picks up a lot of rural areas but also many in London and some other urban locations. Health deprivation and disability also differs from the final IMD map with a more obvious north-south / coalfield pattern. Finally, the most deprived LSOA on each domain is as follows...

• Income: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Employment: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Health and Disability: E01005482 in the Central and Falinge ward of Rochdale
• Education, Skills and Training: E01013640 in the Braunstone Park ward of Leicester
• Barriers to Housing and Services: E01000604 in the Stonebridge ward of Brent
• Crime: E01005454 in the Waterhead ward of Oldham
• Living Environment: E01001780 in the Hoxton ward of Hackney

The fact that these domains are in different spreadsheets makes mapping it all a bit more time-consuming but since I combined them all anyway I decided to create raster versions just to provide a more fluid overview of the patterns across England. I'm sure I'll keep milking this data for a while!