Wednesday 23 October 2013

A few visualisation links

  •  Andy Kirk's Visualising Data site has a useful section listing visualisation resources. The site also has an excellent blog, which includes a monthly selection of data visualisation links.
  • I've been learning ggplot2 recently; it is an excellent R library for creating static graphics. Both of the books listed on the ggplot2 home page are very good (although I haven't read either from cover to cover). Some of the information in the R Graphics Cookbook is available online at Winston Chang's Cookbook for R site.
  • If you haven't used R before, Paul Teetor's R Cookbook could be a good place to start. R in Action (Robert Kabacoff) and The Art of R Programming (Norman Matloff) also get good reviews, but I haven't read either of these two.
With coursework and wedding planning, I'm not likely to have time to write many posts over the next few months.

Wednesday 9 October 2013

Experimental interactive Census maps of English wards

I've put maps for all of the English regions online here. They're at a very early stage, but hopefully there aren't too many bugs! I made use of Alex Singleton's Open Atlas Project code for downloading and reshaping the data.


Monday 7 October 2013

Mapping 2011 Census Data for England and Wales

In addition to labour market statistics, Nomis includes detailed data tables for England and Wales from last four censuses. The site has a handy built-in mapping tool. As an example, here's how to create a map of home ownership in West Midlands. (The image is a screenshot using Nomis's medium size option. The maps quality is even better in extra large size.)
  1. Go to the Census data page (also linked to from the Nomis home page).
  2. Choose Key Statistics, then select Tenure from the list.
  3. In the left column, under Explore, click Advanced Query.
  4. In the geography section, choose select areas within, then select 2011 super output areas - mid-layer in the second drop-down list. From the options that appear, choose regions  and West Midlands.
  5. In the tenure section, select only Owned.
  6. In the percent section, tick percent.
  7. In the format/layout section, select Map.
  8. Click download data, then View map.
The Office for National Statistics has a page of Census visualisations. Alex Singleton at the University of Liverpool has created an atlas of Census maps for each local authority area using Nomis downloads and R.

ONS's Census data publishing strategy is here.