GIS, transport, society and other analytical ramblings.
A mashup of Google graphs and maps.
I have been pondering for some time what the result of displaying bar charts of latitude and longitude population distributions for countries would look like. A co-worker recently shared with me a site with city populations for the whole world. I finally managed to get around to creating a mashup of Google Charts and Maps.
Charts, are a regular component of maps. Just like maps, subtle changes can distort the message that the data has. While maps must lie, by distorting space/scale, charts need not. Yet incomprehension, bias and desire to 'jazz-up' charts usually leads to false 'statements'.
If you’ve never read How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier, now is the time. Since reading this book I have kept an eye out for examples of lying maps and charts. I am often rewarded with examples such as this:
An infographic critique of magazines and their too many ads.
I don’t read magazines. I enjoy the Weekly Guardian newspaper and surf many websites for news. In reading the American ‘bon appétit’ cooking magazine that Julia gifted me for Christmas I have rediscovered that magazines have too much advertisement. Not only are there many explicit ads, there are ads masquerading as columns, and then there are the insidious ads where the magazine is blatantly pushing brand name items in their columns.
Some data analysis ramblings on transport and society using GIS, R, Python, and other effective tools.