The urban footprint of the largest urban areas of Brazil

All my procrastination energy led to me to create this nice little image comparing the footprint of the largest urban agglomeration in Brazil. I created this figure using R and geobr, a package that facilitates downloading official geospatial data of Brazil (a quick intro to geobr here). In our latest update, we included official data on the urban footprint of all Brazilian cities in 2005 and 2015.

[click on the image to enlarge]

Related post:

• The urban footprint of the largest metropolitan areas of Europe

The true size of Chile

Nice map by Boris van der Spek, using The True Size of

3D interactive map of population densities across the globe

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post showing where to find data on population estimates at high spatial resolution for the world. These are great sources of data if one wants to explore and visualize how population density varies across the globe, like in this neat interactive map created by Duncan Smith (CASA UCL).

I'm a big enthusiast of 3D density maps, as you might have noticed by so many of these posted on the blog before (such as this 1, this 2, this 3, this 4, this 5, ....). And apparently I'm not alone. A few days ago, Matt Daniels created a beautiful 3D interactive map of population densities and it went viral on the internet. You can procrastinate browse around the map and check your own region, but don't miss the story Matt published at The Pudding.

image credit: Matt Daniels (The Pudding)

The geography of Manhattan distorted by travel-times

The figure below was created by Stefan Musch from Gradient Metrics (hat tip Jean Legrand). The figure was created using R and ggplot2 based on travel-time estimates from Google Maps API. There is a bit more info about the creation process in this post and perhaps Stefan will share his code at some point.... please? :)

Echoing the comments of others on Twitter.  The figure does a great job illustrating how it is much harder to cross Manhattan from east to west than from north to south. Finally,  it would be great to see how this shape has changed over the last decades using historical travel time estimates.

credit: Stefan Musch (Gradient Metrics)

Mapping the diversity of population ageing across Europe with a ternary colour scheme

Ilya Kashnitsky and Jonas Schöley have recently published this correspondence in The Lancet where they show a very clever way to visualize the spatial heterogeneity of population age structures using choropleth map with ternary colour scheme. The data wrangling was done in R, and the code to replicate get the data and replicate the figure is available on Github.

Needless to say that, if you're interested in demography, R and data, you should be following the work and twitter accounts of Ilya and Jonas.

click on to image to enlarge it

image credit: Ilya Kashnitsky and Jonas Schöley.

Map of the day: how many Switzerlands fit in Brazil

Quite a few, actually. You can  procrastinate  play around with your own map comparisons to  here.

via @onlmaps

R Links

1. Text Mining with R
   
   
2. A great Shiny app to deal with the Traveling Salesman problem
   
   
   
   
   
3. Nice color palettes based on Wes Anderson movies, by Karthik Ram
   
   
4. Rstudio Gallery of examples using TensorFlow and R for deep learning
   
   
5. Cohort analysis: Retention Rate Visualization with R
   
   
6. Network analysis of Game of Thrones by Shirin Glander, via Mara Averick
   
   
7. Creating interactive plots in R with plotly
   
   
8. How to create a smooth transition between chloropleth and cartogram in R

credit: Yan Holts

A challenge for your mental model of the world map

Here is a great exercise to test how accurate is your perception of the relative sizes of countries and continents. My score was 67% in my 1st try and 74% in my second try. Not good considering I'm doing a PhD in geography. sssh don't tell my university otherwise they might not give me my degree

This is part of a PhD research at Ghent University. ht Sebastian Meier‏

Assorted Links

1. Interactive visualization of all the world's flight paths, by Callum Prentice
   
   
   
   
2. Chile is using mobile data to find out how and why women use the city differently than men
   
   
   
   
3. The Actual Voices of Enslaved Black People Recorded From The 1800s, via Danilo Freire
   
   
   
   
4. A research agenda on geospatial big data and cartography, by Anthony C. Robinson et al
   
   
   
   
5. Researchers produce images of people’s faces from their genomes
   
   
   
   
6. Alex Singleton, Seth Spielman and David Folch have a new book called Urban Analytics. The book looks really promising! I haven't had the chance to read it need to work on my phd thesis and it is packed with GitHub resources that you can access here
   
   
   
   
7. A photographer has documented life in this Chinese square for 30 years. via Peter D Smith
   
   
   
   
8. Does causation imply correlation?
   
   
   
   
9. The transition from more than 6 to fewer than 3 children per woman took the UK almost a century. This change took 26 years to happen in Brazil, and only 11 years in China - Max Roser (ht Leo Monasterio)

Assorted Links

1. The next time you have "a new idea no one's thought of before", read this list, be humble and go back to  Google  the library.
   
   
2. This website helps you select a projection for your map (paper here)
   
   
3. Mapping London’s “pseudo-public spaces,” spaces “that appear to be public but are... controlled by developers.” via Geoff Manaugh
   
   
4. How One Brilliant Woman Mapped the Ocean Floor’s Secrets via Sabrina Lai, who is the creator/admin of a great group about Geographical analysis, urban modeling, spatial statistics on Facebook
   
   
5. Infographic of the fascinating timeline of the far future via Tyler Cowen
1. In a 100 million years from now: “Future archaeologists should be able to identify an ‘Urban Stratum’ of fossilized great coastal cities, mostly through the remains of underground infrastructure such as building foundations and utility tunnels.”.
   
   
6. 100 greatest images of Saturn from its Cassini Mission
   
   
7. Heads up for some great opportunities:
1. University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Geography invites applications for a tenure-track position in spatial data science
2. The Ohio State University, Department of Geography invites applications for a tenure track position with expertise in areas such as spatial-temporal data analytics, spatial simulation and modeling, cyberGIS and high performance computing, and/or geovisualization
3. University of Texas St Antonio is hiring a tenure track/Associate demographer who works with big data
   
   
8. Beautiful data visualization of music, by Nicholas Rougeux
   
   
   
   This is a data visualization of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. You should read it read clockwise.
   Size = note length
   Distance from center = pitch
   Colors = instruments.
   
   

Map of the day: the public transport network of Tokyo

Simon Kuestenmacher tweeted the other day this map that shows the public transport network of Tokyo metropolitan area (higher quality image in Japanese here). Tokyo is today the largest metro area with almost 38 million people. The amount of planning and daily work they put in their transport network overt the decades it just jaw dropping, as this maps can tell. 

Related Links:

• Compare the subway systems of Rio and Shanghai between 1979 and 2014
• The impressive expansion of subway systems in China
• Walking Tube map, or the most important map when you are in London
• 15 Subway Maps Compared to Their Actual Geography

Assorted Links

1. Horizonless maps of New York City and Paris, by Peter Richardson (Github repo)
   
   
2. Stunning videos:Flying by Jupiter  and Mars
   
   
3. How to Make the World’s Smallest Cup of Coffee
   
   
4. Deriving Hägerstrand's space-time visualisations from mobility isochrones, by Sebastian Meier
   
   
5. A collaborative collection of Origin-Destination (flow) maps, started by RJ Andrews
   
   
6. Beautiful photographs: 'The North American Indian' 1904-1924
   
   
7. Shrinking cities: the rise and fall of global urban populations – mapped
   
   
8. Subway Maps Compared to Their Actual Geography, by Peter Dovak

via GIPHY

Assorted Links

1. Isoscope: work by Flavio Gortana (Twitter), showing how isochrones by car vary across space and time
   
2. Tutorial: Spatial Datasets and Urban Applications (code, slides + data)
   
   
3. Beautiful photographs of Forgotten Places, via Darran Anderson
   
   
4. Five tools that help you master map projections
   
   
5. The unfinished cities of Spain via Urban Living Lab
   
   
6. 15 years of urban growth in China, via Lazaro Gamio
   
   
7. Surnames and ancestry in Brazil, by Leo Monasterio
   
   
8. "Seeing Theory – A visual introduction to probability and statistics.”
   
   
9. paper: Combining satellite imagery and machine learning to predict poverty, by Neal Jean et al [code]

Map of Population Density Lines in R

If you are familiar with this famous Joy Division cover, you might remember that last year we shared a link that shows you how to reproduce the cover using R ggplot2. If you are a big fan of Joy Division and R, you should know that there is an R package just for that (by @mikefc).

About three years ago in 2014, James Cheshire created the Population Lines Print, a stylized map using lines to show population density in the world. It uses roughly the same data visualization style used in the Joy Division cover. 

credit: James Cheshire

How can you create a nice-looking map like this? Ask no more. James has recently shared the R script and a bit of the history behind his map. Henrik Lindberg has also generously written a gist with a simple and reproducible code to create a map with the same style showing the distribution of the population density in Europe, using R and ggplot2.

and you get this:

credit: Henrik Lindberg

UPDATE: Carson Sievert‏ shows how you can add two (2!) more lines of code to make this map interactive.

I made @galka_max Europe map interactive with 2 more lines of #rstats code https://t.co/KZp0w5YoFH pic.twitter.com/a4GaFJRJVn

— Carson Sievert (@cpsievert) 26 April 2017

Assorted Links

1. A rank of North American Urban Planning Scholars Using Google Scholar Citation Profiles, by Tom Sanchez (twitter)
   
   
2. On a similar note, an interesting commentary on the power of the unrelenting impact factor of academic journals and some interesting arguments to why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research
   
   
3. Isoscope:  nice work by Flavio Gortana (twitter), showing how isochrones by car vary across space and time
   
   
4. How One Brilliant Woman Mapped the Ocean Floor’s Secrets via Sabrina Lai
   
   
5. Possibly the greatest scene in documentary history via David Levinson (twitter)
   
   
6. Bill Rankin's new work on Mapping Slavery Against US Incarceration
   
   
7. A 15-min video giving an interesting summary of the largest US health insurance experiment in history - ht Carl Schmertmann
   
   
8. Beautiful data visualization of music, by Nicholas Rougeux
   
   
9. The Vertical City: The Price of Land and the Height of Buildings in Chicago 1870-2010, by Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt (twitter)

Assorted Links

1. Uber suspends testing of self-driving cars after crash last frieday. Uber's SUV had the right of way and bears no blame
   
   
2. Dr. Mae C. Jemison was the 1st African American woman to travel in space, in 1992.
   
   
3. Harvey Miller's entry on Time geography andspace–time prism for the new International Encyclopedia of Geography. Harvey is also on Twitter
   
   
4.  paper: Network theory may explain the vulnerability of medieval human settlements to the Black Death pandemic
   
   
5. Chronological map of Edinburgh showing expansion of the City from earliest days via Phil Taylor
   
   
6. 15% of the entire housing stock of Florence historic centre is on AirBnB. David Wachsmuth also has a coming paper analyzing Airbnb’s impact on housing and gentrification in New York
   
   
7. Where workers will be needed in the Asia, and where they could come from
   
   
8. In 1900, W.E.B. Du Bois created these beautiful data visualizations for the Paris Exposition Universelle to show the economic and social progress of African Americans since emancipation (via Michal Migurski)

credit: W.E.B. Du Bois

Creating an animated world map of life expectancy changes from 1950 to 2100 in R

I've created this map after a couple of hours  procrastinating  testing the gganimate package in R, which makes it ridiculously simple to create this type animation in .gif or .mp4 format.

The map shows how the life expectancy of each country has changed from 1950 to 2015 and how it is expected to increase up to 2100. It looks better in full screen, but it's still a bit clunky.

I've also created a gist that shows how you can create this map yourself:

Assorted Links

1. The Lone Man Building a Cathedral By Hand
   
   
2. Language Evolution Simulation w/ Agent-Based Modeling via Mara Averick
   
   
3. A research consortium is collecting DNA samples from subway systems around the world to improve our understanding of infectious disease in cities. Here is the interactive map of subway bacteria in New York
   
   
4. People Are Using Britain's New Plastic Money to Play Vinyl Records
   
   
5. Layered Drawings Exploring The Passing Of Time
   
   
6.  A bird that "sings" like chain saw, photographic cameras and car alarms 
   
   
7. Great maps by John Nelson on Five Years of Drought in the US

credit: John Nelson 

How Brazil compares to other countries in terms of area, population and human development

These maps were made by Roberto Rocco with data from 2008.

Area

Population

Human Development Index (HDI)

Assorted Links

1. Luc Anselin and team join University of Chicago  with new Center for Spatial Data Science (ht Kyle Walker)
   
   
2. Skydiver makes parachute-free jump from 25,000 feet (~7,600 metres) and survives!
   
   
3. The Discipline of Philosophy Visualized with Mapping Software: See All of the Complex Networks
   
   
4. Free CAD files of more than 200 major world cities (ht Fabio Storino)
   
   
5. Keep these pictures away from your hipster friend 
   
   
6. A map maker bot that automatically generates maps based on data of the Census American Community Survey
   
   
7. Portugal runs for four days straight on renewable energy alone via Idalina Baptista
   
   
8. Analyzing 22 milion bike rides in the NYC Bike Share System in R