Geographical Visualisation Resources

Tardiness

2011-10-22T10:54:00.000-07:00

Oops. It has been a year since i've updated the blog. What's happened in that time?

1. Teaching Visualisation

Colleagues Kye Askins, Mike Jeffries and myself won research funding from GEES to undertake a project in how to teach students visualisation. We did this as part of a second year module on our BA (Hons) Geography degree which focuses on globalisation. For an assignment students had to visualise an aspect of globalisation. We had high hopes but the work students produced still managed to surprise us. We're in the process of writing it up and will post our report here in the near future.

2. Skateboarding

We've pretty much wrapped our skateboarding research with the acceptance of a second paper: Jenson, A., Swords, J. and Jeffries, M. (forthcoming) "The Accidental Youth Club: Skateboarding in NewcastleGateshead." Journal of Urban Design.

Another paper has been published in Human Geography which focuses on the map we produced from skaters' maps. More info on the project can be found here.

3. Film and TV Production in North East England

I'm currently researching the film and TV industry in North East England. As part of this I'm using a database of productions tagged with a filming location somewhere in the North East on the Internet Movie Database (compiled by a research assistant, Heather Clark). The list of productions and crew who worked on them is huge, and more importantly ripe for visualising. Here is an early iteration:

If you look closely (really closely) there are c.10,000 nodes representing people, organisations and productions and c.14,000 connections between these. Clouds of nodes represent films and TV shows of various types.

Note - there are many caveats with the data. The next few months will be filtering it, and producing iterations to create a more accurate picture of the region's film and TV sectors. It is created in gephi using the force atlas 2 algorithm.

Map of online communities

2010-10-07T01:06:00.001-07:00

xkcd has updated their map of online communities:

Mapping

2010-09-12T02:58:00.000-07:00

Our play:space exhibition about the geographies of skateboarding in Newcastle upon Tyne went well. We had over 100 visitors to the event on the day, and reports are many many more have enjoyed the smaller legacy display we left at Dance City. More detail can be found on the project-specific blog: http://playspacenewcastle.blogspot.com/

Stop, Question and Frisk in New York Neighborhoods

The New York Times has mapped stop and search patterns of the NYPD. More here

Mapping Immigration from New York

The Big Apple is again the focus of mapping. This time Map Your Moves traces migrations patterns to and from New York City by zip code, and includes reasons for move.

First Night of the Blitz

The Guardian have mapped bomb sites from the first raid of the blitz. Map here

Misc

2010-03-12T12:45:00.000-08:00

Food and Trade

Explaining food dependency this video inforgraphic might make it into one of my first year Geographies of Development lectures.

Playing with Google style maps

From NYT blog by Christoph Niemann.

Discovered a new blog

It's geographical an everything! Floating Sheep

Mapping

2010-02-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

Neo-geographers help map Haiti

In the wake of the Haitian earthquake entries on OpenStreetMap soared as volunteers helped map the country's roads, and more importantly, details of the 'quake's impact.

More here.

New tool for creating geographic visualisations

For the US only, but is makes mapping geographic data possible without expensive software. Clearmaps

Skateboarding and the City

One of out third year dissertation students, a colleague and I are currently involved in a project in collaboration with Dance City and Northern Architecture (both here in Newcastle upon Tyne). Part of the methodology involves skaters mapping their Newcastle. Some of the maps - which can be seen here and here - will form part of an exhibition at Dance City in June.

Visualising Regional Disparities

2009-11-21T07:57:00.000-08:00

A little visualisation i made depicting regional tax contributions and government spending by region.

Larger version available here.

How to Visualise...

2009-10-13T23:48:00.000-07:00

By Matthias Shapiro from Ignite Salt Lake City.

Government Spending

2009-09-16T02:04:00.001-07:00

A visualisation from The Guardian's Datablog

The US version from WallStats

How geothermal digging can create earthquakes

2009-08-22T01:24:00.000-07:00

The New York Times outlines how geothermal project in California can generate small earthquakes.

See here

Globalisation of the Premier League

2009-08-15T02:19:00.000-07:00

The BBC have attempted a geographical visualisation outlining the origin of players in the Premier League. There is a club-by-club comparison from today and twenty years ago. There are a number of issues with it (no labelling, no zoom, poor choice of map projection), but it might help spark debate amongst students.

See here for more.

We're Back!

2009-06-25T05:11:00.000-07:00

Apologies for disappearing over the last few months. Things are less hectic now and i've got time to post things again..

Geography of Crime

See FlowingData for 20 visualisations of crime data. It includes offering from the NYT on murders in New York, London burglary rates by borough, and even a map showing the location of Bernie Madoff's victims!

The Economy

A recession is boom time for visualisers it seems.

The State of Britain from the FT uses data from the recent Budget to illustrate dominance of the public sector in the UK economy.

Population

The World of 100 graphics

What's a billion dollars?

2009-03-24T05:21:00.001-07:00

US Economy

2009-03-10T15:05:00.000-07:00

Who is getting what in the bailout package. An interactive visualisation.

US stimulus package visualised

Another visualisation of the bailout.

US unemployment rates (cheers Oli)

Male-female pay differences

Another bailout diagram

Amusing/Clever Visualisations

2009-03-06T02:41:00.000-08:00

A few from thisindexed.com:

Cartoon on correlation from xkcd.com:

Academic(ish):

Demetri Martin with some amusing graphs (adult humour!)

Demetri Martin Stand Up Presentation from Demetri Martin

Presenting Information - Creating Visualisations

2009-02-16T12:52:00.001-08:00

Some useful stuff about making information visual

A visualisation about visualisation styles in the form of the periodic table (thanks for the reminder John).

[click on picture for interactive table]

If you are a fan charts:

A visualisation creation tool from Many Eyes.

With GMapCreator you can map thematic data onto Google Maps (good link Seraphim).

US demographics visualizer

A short piece about information

[if you like the style of presentation see this previous post on kinetic typography]

Some examples/ideas

Nine ways to visualise consumption as found on Flowing Data

Many mind maps.

Youtube and Geography

2009-02-10T11:16:00.000-08:00

Youtube has an increasing number of videos available that are useful for students, and that can complement lectures and seminars. Here are a selection:

Edward Said - an interview with Said and analysis of his work by Prof. Sut Jhally of the University of Masachusetts

David Harvey - A brief history of Neoliberalism

See also the excellent davidharvey.org which has videos of his course on reading Marx as well as comments on recent events.

The European Graduate School has a series of videos of talks from a range of theorists, including Donna Haraway , Judith Butler, and Jean Baudrillard.

There are numerous conversations with, and videos of Michael Porter

Not a video, but an audio recording of Doreen Massey's Radio 3 lecture is available to download, along with a transcript from the OU.

Various Infographics

2009-01-30T12:06:00.000-08:00

All from Princeton's International Networks Archive

Obama Inauguration

2009-01-19T15:15:00.001-08:00

Amongst the wall to wall coverage of Barack Obama's inauguration are some interesting visualisations.

CNN offers a timeline of Bush's presidency.

The BBC has a short film about changing attitudes to race in America featuring Terrence Roberts and his family.

The New York Times presents a series of features including an interactive map of places to go in Washington for anyone visiting for the inauguration; a 3D map of the parade route; but most interesting an analysis of Presidential inaugural addresses from 1789 to present. Along with a little bit of history and the option to read the whole speech, they present a list of the words most used by the incoming president. I've mentioned this before, but you can do a similar analysis of any piece of text with word clouds at wordle.net. Below is George Washington's and George Bush's first inaugural addresses.

Washington:

Bush:

Try it yourself with a journal article or interview transcript. See also a previous post.

Development

2009-01-17T07:37:00.000-08:00

Exploiting Africa feature from the New York Times

The UN have a series of interactive features based on their Human Development Reports (Flash required to play some of them). See also Gapminder.org for some awesome ways to represent time series data.

The Luckiest Nut in the World, a short animated film about trade liberalisation and its impact on developing nations.

A slideshow from the NYT about Zimbabwe.

Interconnections

2009-01-17T04:18:00.000-08:00

MIT mapping phone calls from New York to the rest of the world (thanks for the link Oli)

Global air traffic in a single day.

The BBC's Britain from Above resources and Youtube videos.

Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia 1600-1834 exhibition at the British Library.

The flow of immigrants to the US.

Mapping music and artist connections done in a Simon Pattersonesque style. Perhaps not strictly geography, but it is a map.

From Princeton's Mapping Globalization project, a map of telegraph lines in 1869.

Representing Populations

2009-01-14T13:02:00.000-08:00

The world's population as pixels, including you, from Population: One

Everyone in the world in one room: an art installation from Stan's Cafe. Videos containing more details: 1 and 2.

Shrinking the human population to 100 - The Miniature Earth Project

A globe of data (note - not just population) from infomagnet.com

The always excellent Worldmapper

Live population (and other) statisitcs at Worldometers.info

Icaro Doria using flags to represent data.

Gaza Conflict

2009-01-06T09:34:00.000-08:00

Visualisations and timeline of the current conflict from the BBC and The Guardian.

A longer timeline from the New York Times

A map of bombings and casualties.

A shrinking world?

2009-01-03T03:09:00.000-08:00

Some projects mapping the uneven travel times between places:

Travel times in London, Cambridge and for Great Britain.

Princeton's non-geographic mapping project. Chose your city and find out how close places are.

Travel times in Japan.

London's tube map redrawn...and again.

Economic and Financial Geographies

2008-12-19T07:35:00.000-08:00

The new global wealth machine - the new way money makes the world go round.

How Americans spend their money.

Where does the US budget go? The answer can be found here.

The US economy since 1920.

The complex world of media company ownership .

Global corporations and their connections.

Financial Crisis

Changes in the market capitalisation of the US' top financial institutions from the New York Times. A similar interactive graphic from portfolio.com.

Also from the New York Times, a timeline of the financial crisis.

A flow chart explain financial crisis from mint.com.

The Financial Times' walk down Bank Street.

Graphs and explanation from the BBC.

Visualising collateralized debt obligations (CDO) with Paddy Hirsch, the Senior Editor of Marketplace

The value of mortgages held by US banks that are 90 days late from And Still I Persist. It uses the amazing tools from Gapminder.org.

Bird and Fortune explaining the subprime crisis.

Historic Maps

2008-12-17T02:08:00.000-08:00

Maps are probably the oldest type of geographical visualisation. For me, old maps are always interesting and are often works of art rather than a functional representation of space. Here are some links to online historic map collections:

British Library maps from their mapping history exhibition
US Library of Congress map archive - mainly of the US but includes some beautiful maps of the world (see above)
Historic maps of cities
Old panorama maps
History of cartography - maps through history
Princeton's map archive - some great stuff for teaching globalisation
Osher map library
Stuckenberg Map Collection
Ryhiner Collection
Tohoku University
Historic maps of China
Historic maps of Africa
Norman B. Leventhal Map Centre
Hipkiss's scans of old maps

Other:

Map of cannibalism
Satirical maps from WW1

Doing Good with Kinetic Typography

2008-12-14T06:29:00.000-08:00

Kinetic typography is all the rage amongst designers (expect to see it in lots of adverts very soon). Essentially it is text that moves to achieve:

- Literal illustration of language
- Rhythmic embellishment of language
- Personification of language
- Polymorphous disruption of language

(more on the theory here)

By animating the text a message becomes both clearer and, more importantly, incredibly powerful. The classic examples include scenes from films (Pulp Fiction and Devil's Advocate - warning strong language).

As well as more popular uses, a number of animations have emerged with a more normative goal:

Empowering women in developing countries:

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

The hidden cost of the Iraq War:

The Growth of Walmart

2008-12-14T06:22:00.000-08:00

Some interesting videos charting the growth of Walmart in the US.

Toby Segaran's version
One from Flowing Data (an excellent source for all kinds of visualisation material)

Economic Geography - world economic activity

2008-12-14T06:07:00.000-08:00

G-Econ (Geographically based Economic data) is a Yale project mapping the location of economic activity.

Using economic data for each 1 degree by 1 degree square of the Earth's surface they have created a series of globes highlighting economic activity across the world.

G-Econ homepage
G-Econ on Flickr

Word Clouds

2008-10-19T11:41:00.000-07:00

Word clouds are all the rage at the moment. They are simple visualisation of word frequency in a given sample of text. Wordle.net allows you to create your own. Their most popular current use is to analysis the US presidential debates. This is presumably to replace political commentators.

The above word cloud of Chapter 1 of Capital; one can clearly see Marx's major themes. Which makes you wonder what a word cloud of an interview transcript, an essay, or a journal article might reveal...

If you want to do your own analysis try here.

Geographies of Consumption

2008-10-18T11:54:00.000-07:00

Chris Jordan is an American photographer concerned with consumption. His latest work is a series of portraits of mass consumption in the US using digital photography techniques. He explains some of his work in this video.

The image below is a photograph measuring 1.5m x 2.5m, and shows the number of disposable hot-beverage paper cups used in the US every fifteen minutes, a staggering 410,000!

A close up of the picture:

Capital consumption from worldmapper.org

Walmart: This animation maps the growth of the world's largest retailer. To reiterate the point, this visualisation measures the acreage it, and other well known retailers, covers. According to the chart, collectively Walmart stores would more than cover Manhattan.

Tim Graham, a fellow blogger, is currently keeping statistics on everything he consumes (now there's an interesting dissertation topic). You can read how is getting on on his site. He's turned the data into some interesting visuals, such as his attempts to give up Coca-cola:

Oil resources and consumption

This image from the Economist depicts global oil consumption.

Some useful images from, whisper it, Wikipedia:

Oil consumption per capita
Oil producing countries

Pollution

2008-10-16T03:14:00.000-07:00

Some links to visuals relating to pollution:

The above picture, showing the make up of world greenhouse gas emissions, is taken from the World Resources Institute's Climate Analysis Indicators Tool site. There you'll find a variety of images relating to greenhouse gas emissions.

London Air is a project run by the Environmental Research Group at Kings College London. It is full of plotting air quality data for Greater London. As well as reports and news items, there are a series of statistical and graphing tools that let you customise their data. There is also some maps, of which the 3D one is a highlight.

Part of IBM's Collaborative User Experience research groupMany Eyes have a searchable database of visualisations. Searching for 'pollution' reveals gems such as US Industrial Air Emissions of Toxic Chemicals, 2004 by state; Global CO2 Emissions Compared To Land Area; Total Waste Disposed in Canada; and Air Pollution in China, 2005.

MapEcos (left) is an interactive map of US facilities and their pollution levels. It is searchable by name, industry, owner, type of emissions, level of emissions and hazard level. The site is optimised for Firefox and IE users.

The New York Times' coverage of the Olympics was excellent and included an interesting piece on air pollution in Beijing.

Earlier in the year AEG-ELECTROLUX ran a project on noise awareness using posters with embedded sound meters.

Presentations 101

2008-10-15T14:02:00.000-07:00

The Art of Presentation

As academics presenting is a major part of what we do. Whether it is research ideas in proposals, findings in journals, or theories and concepts in lectures, presenting is our bread and butter. Most of us can recall a dull conference presentation or boring lecture we've been to, and are probably guilty of doing the same ourselves. It isn't hard to highlight reasons behind a bad presentation or to come up with measures to improve things. However, there comes a point where it is difficult to move beyond a limited set of formats and we need some inspiration. Fortunately, help is at hand, and comes in the form of Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. This is a brilliant blog about the art of making visual presentations. Some useful highlights include:

Finding good images
How to present 'naked'
Gates vs Jobs
Good PowerPoint design

There is also an interesting piece based on the insights of Ira Glass, a US radio broadcaster. Here is Ira taking about story telling using anecdotes; a potentially useful way to describe the emergence of new concepts to undergraduates...

Sharing presentations and gaining feedback

As we all know feedback is a useful way to spur improvement. SlideShare is a website designed to allow you to share and again feedback on presentations. There is even an Education & E-Learning group for discussion of what works and what doesn't.

Exemplar

Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institutet and Director of Gapminder Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden, is becoming a bit of a cult figure amongst visualisation bloggers. In 2006 he made a presentation at the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference in Monterey, California, on new ways to present statistics about uneven development. This is his talk:

Parts 2 and 3 are available on YouTube. More details of his work can be found at the Gap Minder website.

Further Reading

An essay on PowerPointism by Edward Tufte, and a response from graphpaper.com