WhereCampEU: Some Thoughts
WhereCampEU Intro from Christopher Osborne on Vimeo. Last Friday and Saturday I was part of WhereCampEU “the geo unconference for Europe”. Being an unconference there was no formal agenda instead...
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Stunning Old Atlases
As I have mentioned before, archive.org provides some amazing resources for free download. I thought I would have a look to see what it had in the way of old atlases and I wasn’t disappointed. Here are...
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Historic London
Much of the research we do in UCL Geography and CASA relates to London. One of the most interesting aspects of the city is its growth and development (you can see changes in London’s population density...
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Tales from the (former) LSE Geography Map Room
Last week I heard that the London School of Economics Geography Department was disposing of its maps and that anyone interested was free to rescue them. My first reaction was one of surprise as maps...
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Maps with ggplot2
The ggplot2 package offers powerful tools to plot data in R. The plots are designed to comply with the “grammar of graphics” philosophy and can be produced to a publishable level relatively easily....
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My Week in Maps
This week has been a busy one with the “publication” of a couple of maps I have been involved with alongside the circulation of a few cartographic gems. I thought I would share my mapping highlights....
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The Power of Comparison: Just How Big Is It?
If I said a country was 1594719800 metres squared it would mean a lot less to you than if I said it was about the size of Greater London (so long as you know about how big Greater London is). For...
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Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800
I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands) sailing between 1750 and 1850....
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In Maps We Trust
Of all the different types of data visualisation, maps* seem to have the best reputation. I think people are much less likely to trust a pie chart, for example, than a map. In a sense, this is amazing...
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London: The Information Capital
I am pleased announce that London: The Information Capital will be published on the 30th October. It is a book bursting with maps and graphics about the world’s greatest city and the result of a year...
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My Year in Maps
Lots happened in 2016 to keep cartographers busy…here are some of my highlights (in no particular order). Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line at the British Library is an absolutely...
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Joy Division, Population Surfaces and Pioneering Electronic Cartography
There has been a resurgence of interest in data visualizations inspired by Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover. These so-called “Joy Plots” are easier to create thanks to the development of...
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How the Victorians Mapped London’s Cholera
It is, of course, John Snow who is credited with using maps to demonstrate that the clusters of deaths from cholera in London’s Soho during London’s 1854 outbreak were caused by contaminated water....
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