Blog retrospective

This blog is now officially archived because I'm moving on to other things (including a new blog, which I launched at the end of 2015). However, I thought it would be good to do one final post here to wrap things up - and to encourage anyone thinking about blogging to give it a go. I've not exactly set the world alight with the stuff on here, but quite a few people have found it useful and it's led to some very interesting work. Someone once even said they were a 'big fan'. Anyway, back in 2007 when I was a Research Associate at the University of Manchester, my colleague and car-sharing partner Alex Hardman encouraged me to start blogging. So I did, and here I am eight years later. It wouldn't be undertheraedar without a map, so here's one showing page views by country (click all images to enlarge).

The United States was going to overtake the UK, so I had to stop.

The blog has led to collaboration with people like Simon Rogers at Google - previously with The Guardian and Twitter, and led to lots of media contacts, news stories and idea-sharing with other academics. It's also enabled me to get some of the findings from my academic papers out to a wider audience - which is partly why I began writing it in the first place. But which posts have been the most popular? Well, that's an interesting story and here's a little chart showing the top ten - including a major outlier at number one.

Note to self - write stuff about London on new blog

Twitter obviously helped a lot. Alex Hardman also encouraged me to get on Twitter early, so I signed up almost straight away but just couldn't get it so abandoned it and came back to it relatively late, in July 2011. You can kind of see how my blog traffic developed since then in this line graph, which peaked at over 13,000 page views in October 2015.

Peaks and troughs, but reasonable level of growth over time

Where did my traffic come from? A typically eclectic range of sources but a lot from Google. You can see this in the Referring URLs and Referring Sites charts below. 

Am I big in Wisconsin?

What about the tech battles? The battle of the browsers? You can see from the data below that Chrome wins the browser war, Windows wins the operating system war and that 596 page views came from Unix. 

William Playfair invented the pie chart in 1801

Total page views all time? 403,984 (as of 2 Sept 2016), but of course there are all sorts of views on the accuracy of blogger stats vs Google Analytics, which normally come out with lower figures (often around half). But even if it was just 300,000 bots viewing my pages, I know for sure some actual humans looked at my posts because they told me, so that makes it worthwhile. 

In a world where an academic paper with 50 citations is quite a big deal, getting a few hundred thousand page views is a nice way to make you feel like you can reach a wider audience. Some people may not like some of the stuff I posted and some of it is - looking back - slightly embarrassing but then that's all part of the learning experience. 

If you've followed this site, or just looked once, thanks for taking an interest. I'll be back with new stuff - and more maps and stats - in the new year (or possibly before). If you're thinking about blogging, give it a bash. It can be hard to keep publishing content but I've found it really worthwhile.

Alasdair Rae

Sheffield

1 December 2015

(updated 2 September 2016)

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.

Unemployment in Europe (via Google)

Despite recent headlines about data capture, Google remains an excellent source of (or gateway to) information on socio-demographic data. For example, if you type in 'population' followed by a country name, such as 'mexico' then this is what you'll get...

If you do this with any country you'll get the latest results plus a little graph which you can then click on and explore further. Similarly, if you type in 'eu unemployment' you will see a little chart showing EU unemployment - currently 10.2% for March 2012 - and how it has changed over time. If you click on the small chart you'll then see data for Europe and be able to add in data for other EU nations by clicking the boxes to the left. You can even embed this in a web page, as you can see below...

Apart from being convenient and accurate, this is also a very useful analytical tool when you need quick comparisons, like in the example below where I've compared Spain, the EU, Germany and Austria. As you can see the time-series data does not always extend as far back as we'd like but it is a great way to get your head round what is happening in different places without much effort at all. You'll notice in the embedded graphs that if you hover over a line it should tell you the data value for that point.

I've now changed the criteria in the chart so that it only includes unemployment for those aged less than 25 - and I've added in the UK too. This makes pretty grim reading for the EU, and Spain in particular...

This method also works for lots of other kinds of data. For example, if you type in 'us gdp' you'll see the data for the US but also have the option to add in lots of other comparators. One of the most interesting comparisons is looking at GDP over time, as you can see below.

I'm going to a conference in China at the end of June, hence my interest in national comparisons. This kind of thing has of course been covered extensively by Hans Rosling, but not many people know that it is fully integrated into Google's basic functionality.

Visualising London Population Growth

Update, 7 June 2011 - See bottom of post for a new animation...

Following the theme of the last post - and the last series of posts with video content and animations, this is a short post on the development of London's population, by Borough, from 1801 to 2001. The data is, of course, Crown Copyright - and I downloaded the files from here, in case you want to know. There are a lot of data here, so how to make sense of it? First of all, an animated bar chart sequence, with the original 1963 Inner London Boroughs (i.e. not the ONS definition) in red and the Outer London Boroughs in blue...


You can see it in full size here, to enable reading of label names.

The next experiment in visualizing this data was to convert it into a Google motion chart. The results of this are shown below. You can start the graphics by hitting the play button and you can query them by hovering over any of the coloured bubbles. To label a bubble, just click it. It's a bit small here but this is just for illustration. Experiment with the tabs at the top of the initial chart to see the data in a different format. There's lots of options for experimenting here...



Finally, a view of what all this looks like spatially, in 3D.

As for the data itself, you can discover a lot from these visualizations, but the high point in population for a London Borough was Tower Hamlets in 1901, with 597,000 and the low point was in Brent with 2,000 in 1801 and 1811.

Postscript, 7 June 2011. I've since done a proper London animation for the Centre for Cities. A small version is shown below. For the full version, check this link.