A slightly different kind of tutorial today in that it involves no maps and instead is about how to get a data table from Wikipedia - or ot...| www.statsmapsnpix.com
It's time to bring the curtain down on Stats, Maps n Pix now, after 1.5 million page views and 150 posts. I'll leave the blog archived here, but if you're looking for me, you can always find me via my business website. | Stats, Maps n Pix
Over a decade ago I set out to understand exactly where England's green belt land was by getting my hands on the raw data. Eventually it became open data and there's an update every year, along with loads of stats. At the time of writing, the proportion of land in England designated as green belt* was 12.6% of the total. But nobody lives in the green belt, right? Or at least hardly anyone, right? Or at least not that many, right? If you search online you won't find an answer to this question ...| Stats, Maps n Pix
I'm sharing a file of the location of all railway stations in Great Britain, put together from Table 1410 of the UK's Office of Rail and Road (ORR). So, clearly, a momentous occasion. I published something similar years ago and I see people still using it but the old one doesn't have new stations like Reston, Inverness Airport or Marsh Barton in it. Oh, and I also calculated the nearest station (as the crow flies) for each station, just out of curiosity. Here's the spreadsheet. | Stats, Maps n Pix
A short post today, with some visuals. I used some Blue Marble imagery from NASA - one layer was topography and the other was the colour image of the earth for August - and then I used the prelease v2 of Aerialod to visualise it. I tweaked the Blue Marble colours slightly and the elevation and bathymetry (in the final images) is greatly exaggerated, for effect.| Stats, Maps n Pix
There are new constituency boundaries in the UK so we made a new hex map. This means that the ones used in previous elections have been replaced by a new set. There are still 650 constituencies but they are in many cases quite different so any election boffins/mappers will need to get used to them, and their new shapes and names, pretty quickly. Take a look at this interactive map if you want to compare them (will load slowly, is best on big screen). When is the next UK general election? Well...| Stats, Maps n Pix
A short post today about the QGIS YouTube channel I just launched: called Map Academy. I have my Udemy courses online, and these are aimed at people who want a fully-fledged end-to-end QGIS course at intro or intermediate level. The Udemy courses are going pretty well and I have more than 6,000 students in 148 countries so far - with the top countries being the US, India, the UK, Germany, Canada, Nigeria, Turkey, Indonesia, Egypt and Brazil. If you want to request a video on my new YouTube ch...| Stats, Maps n Pix
Another road-themed piece today, this time looking at US Interstates, and how many people live in between them. Why? Curiosity, plus it's a nice little data challenge using Census block population data from 2020. First off, let's start with the Beltway around Washington, D.C. - using 2020 Census data I get a total population of just under 2 million people (1,961,212), as you can see below.| Stats, Maps n Pix
In my last blog piece I wrote about my attempt to find a longer straight line in Great Britain that doesn't cross a public road than the one identified by Ordnance Survey in their 2019 blog. I did this using their OS Open Roads dataset, and I excluded public roads because that's what I think makes most sense. I found a longer line in a different area, though I definitely wouldn't recommend trying to walk it but I would recommend watching this video. I wasn't quite satisfied that my previous l...| Stats, Maps n Pix
In short, I believe I've found a longer straight line without crossing a public road than the line identified by Ordnance Survey in 2019. Important stuff, clearly. Let me explain.| Stats, Maps n Pix
So, you've heard about the mysterious 🌏 geometry generator 🌍in QGIS and you want to know more? You're in the right place. No idea what I'm talking about but you do use QGIS? Well you're still probably in the right place because I'm going to explain things here, with examples you can try yourself. I've put this post together for anyone who really wants to know what a geometry generator in QGIS can do. So before going any further here's a map of US states where I have used a geometry ge...| Stats, Maps n Pix
The most densely populated square kilometre in the United States is on the Upper East Side in New York City. This is not a surprise, so in this long and slightly messy post I'll say a bit more about my attempts to calculate exactly where it is and how many people live there, using US Census 2020 data and a similar method to my previous post on the most densely populated square km of the United Kingdom. I also attempt to find the most densely populated square kilometre in each state. If you're...| Stats, Maps n Pix
After the recent release of England and Wales Census data for 2021 I decided to take a quick look at which areas have the highest population density. I've done this kind of thing before, for the whole of Europe and also in relation to thinking about measures of population density more generally - in short, my view is that using the arithmetic mean approach to density makes very little sense at the country level because it doesn't reflect how we actually experience density (unless we live some...| Stats, Maps n Pix
This post contains a few GIS related thoughts, offered in the spirit of sharing that's at the core of open source. A bit like QGIS itself, I hope. My goal is not to convince anyone that they should be using QGIS but rather to convince potential GIS users that QGIS is now, at 21 years old, a mature, robust, powerful product used by millions of users and thousands of major corporations and universities worldwide - as well as lots of small companies like my own. | Stats, Maps n Pix
Many people who read this blog will be familiar with Karim Douïeb's fantastic 'transition between surface area of US counties and their associated population' map, shown below.| Stats, Maps n Pix
This is a short tutorial about how to display label callouts (sometimes referred to as 'leader lines') in QGIS. This has been possible for a while, but not everyone knows it's possible, or how to do it. So long as you're using QGIS version 3.10 or later, you create callouts for your labels very easily. Before going any further, here's an example of a map where label callouts would be useful (below). And here's the map layer I'm using for this tutorial, in case you want to follow along with th...| Stats, Maps n Pix
This topic of population by latitude has always interested me, and it's something I've written about here before. But I'm also very interested in population by altitude, so that's what this short post is about - population by altitude across Great Britain. This is one of a few pieces I've had sitting on my computer, unfinished, for a while so I'm posting what I have now because I think people might find it interesting.| Stats, Maps n Pix
Back in 2013 I published a paper in the journal Cities with the following title: 'English urban policy and the return to the city: A decade of growth, 2001–2011'. I actually wrote it in 2012 and it drew upon some of the urban policy things I'd written about in my PhD a few years earlier. If I had access to the paper now, or if I wanted to spend $27.95, I could even read it again but the gist of it was this: people came back to the city centre, in quite big numbers, between 2001 and 2011. | Stats, Maps n Pix
In one of my many 'playing around with map stuff and then posting it on twitter' adventures, I recently posted a kind of comet map - see below. This started off as something completely different but once I had the basic idea I then wondered what kind of data I could apply it to, and that's why I did it to the UK political map of 2019. Read on below for how I did it, as well as how you can replicate it pretty easily in QGIS. Scroll straight to the bottom if you're just looking for the 'how-to'...| Stats, Maps n Pix
Let's begin with a story, from some time around the early 1990s in the north of Scotland. I used to go to a church in Inverness with my Mum when I was growing up and although I've forgotten lots of things, one of the things I do remember is the minister asking this question at the start of a sermon:| Stats, Maps n Pix
How big is Tokyo? What's the population of Tokyo? What even is Tokyo? All excellent questions, so in this long read I'll try to explain my answers to these questions by way of data and maps, including some new analysis I've done. But first, here's a photo of the urban area, plus a map of Tokyo prefecture - I'll say more about it later on - including a bit about the remote Tokyo island shaped like a shark's tooth.| Stats, Maps n Pix
It has been said that making a map is 80% labelling, and 20% everything else. Okay, I just made that up, but if you've spent any time at all using GIS software you'll see the truth in this. Sometimes I end up spending far too much time on labelling, but then again it's usually time well spent because it makes things clearer. Too many labels and we're overwhelmed, too few and we're left guessing. I put this post together for anyone who uses QGIS and wants to know a bit more about labelling - j...| Stats, Maps n Pix
Today I'm letting Urble out into the wild. It's a little geography game in which a new city (displayed as a small square) appears every 5 seconds until there are 10 dots on screen (example below). The aim of Urble is to guess the country before the country shape appears- 50 seconds into the video. You can pause the video after the 10th dot (at 45 seconds) if you need more time. If you turn the sound on, you'll notice that when the 10th city is added it makes a different sound. I'm releasing t...| Stats, Maps n Pix
Where is the green belt? Where are the green belts? How much of my area is green belt land? These are excellent questions, but it's not always super easy to find the answer, and that's why I originally began investigating this topic back in 2012. This then eventually led to me producing maps for each English local authority that had green belt land in it, thanks to an idea suggested to me by geo legend Prof Bob Barr. Since I last did this in 2018 the number of local authorities in England has...| Stats, Maps n Pix
Over the past few decades, UK universities and other higher education institutions have been subject to an assessment of their research quality through something called the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and more recently the Research Excellence Framework (REF). When I got an academic job at the University of Sheffield in 2008, it was probably because my last name is Rae and the year was 2008 and they thought I'd be good for their RAE2008 profile. Anyway, I left my academic job a couple o...| Stats, Maps n Pix
