Creating an animated gif of public transport networks using GTFS data

Assorted Links

1. Evolution of European Motorways 1920-2020
   
   
2. Dataviz of spatial and temporal spread in networks
   
   
3. paper: Open office architecture seems to decrease the volume of face-to-face employees' interaction and increase electronic interaction.
   
   
4. Global Mapping of GDP at 1 km2 Using VIIRS Nighttime Satellite Imagery
   
   
5. Microsoft releases 18M building footprints in Uganda and Tanzania to enable AI Assisted Mapping
   
   
6. OpenRailwayMap, the open online map of the worldwide railroad infrastructure
   
   
7. In 2019, Helsinki had 0 pedestrian or cyclist fatalities for the first time since 1960. How Lowering speeds and traffic calming.

geobr v1.1 is on CRAN

Good news! The new version of geobr v1.1 has been published on CRAN.

The geobr package in R is probably the easiest and fastest way to download shapefiles and official spatial data sets of Brazil. The package includes a wide range of geospatial data available at various geographic scales and for various years with harmonized attributes, projection and topology.

You can find a simple tutorial on how to use the package here.

The new release of geobr v1.1 includes 19 data sets:

1. country
2. region
3. state
4. meso region
5. micro region
6. intermediate region
7. immediate region 
8. municipality
9. weighting area 
10. census tract 
11. statistical grid
12. urban areas
13. health facilities
14. indigenous land
15. conservation units 
16. biomes
17. legal Amazon 
18. semiarid
19.  disaster risk areas

The Build-up of OpenStreetMap data in East Asia

Another neat dataviz from the ItoWorld team, this time visualizing all the edits to road networks in OpenStreetMap for East Asia since 2008.

OpenStreetMap Series: East Asia Build-up from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

A list of my favorite entries to the 2019 'Information is Beautiful Awards'

Every year since 2012, David McCandless (founder of Information is Beautiful) and a team analyze hundreds of data visualizations, infographics, interactives etc to recognize some of them with the Information is Beautiful Awards. Here is a list in no particular order of some of my favorite entries to the 2019 Information is Beautiful Awards.

1. Racial Disparities In Illinois Traffic Stops
   
   
2. Britain's Top 40 Most Complex Motorway Junctions
   
   
3. Imaging The Entire Earth, Every Day
   
   
4. How much warmer is your city?
   
   
5. Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles. Every day, 1.3 billion plastic bottles are sold around the world
6. Earth At Night, Mountains Of Light, by Jacob Wasilkowski
   
   
7. The Opportunity Atlas
   
   
8. American segregation, mapped at day and night
   
   
9. Dynamic visualization of schedules in The Netherlands
   
   
10. Visualising TomTom Probe Data In Amsterdam
    
    
    
11. How does your zip code impact your health?
    
    
12. 3D Map of Land Values in Japan: 1989 - 2019
    
    
13. Britain’s Most Trodden Paths
    
    
14. The spatial associattion between the prevalence of diabetes in London neighborhoods with the diversity of nutrients of 1.6B grocery purchases
    
    
15. How Many Years Do We Lose To The Air We Breathe?
    
    
16. The complex relationship between certainty and scientific discovery
    
    
17. The Minimum Fleet Network model

The race for the largest city in the world over the past 500 years

In previous posts, I've pointed out to an incredible open dataset with comprehensive population estimates of human settlements and cities for the past 6,000 years. The talented John Burn-Murdoch used some of these data to create this nice animation showing the changing ranks of the 10 largest cities in the world since 1500. The full code for the animation is available here.

New project:

A “Bar Chart Race” animation showing the changing ranks of the 10 biggest cities in the world since 1500.

Fascinating to watch giant cities vanish after falling in conquests, and amazing that three UK cities were in the top 8 in the late 1800s. pic.twitter.com/KglMZbYobr

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 18, 2019

Assorted Links

1. Paper: "exposure to socioeconomic inequality in an everyday setting negatively affects willingness to publicly support a redistributive economic policy" by Melissa Sands
   
   
2. Peak Artificial Intelligence
   
   
3. Interactive historic map of every UK railway line that's ever existed, via Tim Dunn
   
   
4. Oxford DEMIG databases with unprecedented coverage of migration & migration policy data now available for free download, via Hein de Haas
   
   
5. Using machine learning in R to predict Automobile Collision and Bike Share Demand and subsidy via Ken Steif
   
   
6. Awful AI: a curated list to track current scary usages of AI - hoping to raise awareness, HT Will Geary
   
   
7. The software used to create the black hole in the movie 'Interstellar' is a full implementation of Einstein's equations in 40,000 lines of C++, and rendered thousands of 23-megapixel IMAX frames on a 32,000-core render farm at about 20 core-hours per frame via John Arundel
   
   
8. What to consider when choosing colors for data visualization, by Lisa Rost

credit: Lisa Rost

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)

Assorted Links on mortality

1. The case for monitoring life-span inequality, via José Manuel Aburto
   
   
2. Mortality from road crashes in 193 countries: a comparison with other leading causes of death, ht Romulo Krafta
   
   
3. The slowing pace of life expectancy gains since 1950
   
   
4. How life expectancy in U.S. counties compares to other countries via Simon Kuestenmacher
   
   
5. R package: mortAAR, for archeological demography. It provides functions for the analysis of archaeological mortality data See Chamberlain (2006). There is a vignette on Lifetables and an Extended Discussion
   
   
6. R package: MortalityLaws, for downloading data from the Human Mortality Database and building parametric mortality models and life tables, by Marius Pascariu
   
   
7. R package: MortCast, for estimating and Projecting of age-specific mortality rates, by Hana Sevcikova, Nan Li and Patrick Gerland (paper here) - via Adrian Raftery‏
   
   
8. Beautiful Lexis-surface plot showing age and period specific mortality ratios of females and males, by Jonas Schöley (interactive version at the Human Mortality Explorer)

image credit: Jonas Schöley

Visualizing transport mode share using a ternary colour scheme

A few months ago, I posted about an inventive way of using a ternary colour scheme to visualize the heterogeneity in population ageing across Europe. The work was done by Ilya Kashnitsky and Jonas Schöley, who gently shared the R code to reproduce this kind of dataviz.

This is also a great technique to visualize how transport mode share varies across different neighborhoods of a city. This chart below was created by Ignacio Pérez and it shows the mode split of different communes in Santiago (Chile).

image credit: Ignacio Pérez

The landscape and pulses of dockless bikes in Singapore

Yang Xu ‏(Twitter) and his team at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University have a new research project to understand the usage of dockless bike-sharing system and its relationship with built environment in Singapore. More info about the project in Yang's website.

Nice kickoff video created using deck.gl

Chart of the Day

A 'very good' (exclamation mark) chart that "reveals exactly how positively and negatively the population perceives various descriptions to be." (ht Simon Kuestenmacher). This chart was created by Matthew Smith, and it was inspired in this older chart below on Perceptions of Probability and Numbers, by Zoni Nation.

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.

Chart of the day: The rich cultural diversity of 200 Years of US immigration

The accumulated history of US immigration visualized as rings in a growing tree trunk. The chart was created by Pedro M. Cruz and John Wihbey using IPUMS data. It's the first time I see migration data depicted in this way and it does a really terrific job drawing attention to composition diversity and population history.

UPDATE: Leah Boustan has just drawn my attention on Twitter for an important shortcoming of this cart. Leah has rightly pointed that:

"This graphic is great for visualizing changes in composition of immigrant flow to US over time but obscures dramatic fluctuations in magnitude. ~1 mil immigrants entered per year in 1910, down to 100k by 1930 — yet the concentric circles makes it seem like entry grows over time"

Visualizing space-time networks

I've said this on Twitter before but I should say it here as well. Craig Taylor and the Ito World team have some of the best data visualizations of geospatial data related to cities and transport networks.

Just a few days ago, Craig tweeted some of his latest work with neat visualizations of drive-time network for catchment area analysis. Here is a video comparing different cities in the UK and a brief explanation on how to read the dataviz.

"30 minute drive time analysis from major UK cities visualised as 3d coral geometry. 

The thickness of artery is proportional to the number of networks connected to it indicating busier routes. The falloff in height is linked to the proximity to the centre. 

Corals aren’t normalised in scale as the purpose of this is visualising the form and pattern the networks create. Animation is a boomerang motion scaling from 0 to 30 min and back again. Congestion/traffic not accounted for."

click at the bottom of the video to watch it in full screen and high definition

Yep, there are some obvious parallels here with Time Geography and in particular with the representation of space-time prisms. The static version of the space-time trees gives a sharper visualization of the data.

The space-time tree, or 3d coral geometry as Craig said.

and the inverted original dataviz, "the drive time web"

Assorted links

1. Automation and AI will increase spatial/regional inequalities. Paper by Morgan Frank and colleagues
   
   
2. Explore, select and download data of the global population projections by age, sex and education, a great collaborative work of researchers from the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital
   
   
3. The team led by Max Roser at Our World in Data is hiring a postdoctoral researcher in the area of global health and population sciences
   
   
4. Greyhound: a powerful platform to interactively explore and analyze massive point clouds with Trillions of points in the browser, via Howard Butler
   
   
   
   
5. The dynamical structure of political corruption networks. A paper by Haroldo Ribeiro, Luis Alves et al., analyzing 27 years of political corruption scandals in Brazil
   
   
6. Citywide effects of high-occupancy vehicle restrictions: Evidence from “three-in-one” in Jakarta, by Rema Hanna et al.
   
   
7. Want to find statistically significant hierarchical modules in weighted networks? paper here and code here, by Tiago Peixoto, who is the author of the graph-tool Python library

Assorted Links

1. The world’s largest subway system goes cashless as Shanghai Metro adopts QR code
   
   
   
   
2. Fitness tracking app Strava data gives away location of secret US army bases
   
   
   
   
3. Marriages have on average long lasting positive effects on well-being and life satisfaction HT Cesar Hidalgo I cannot confirm nor deny
   
   
   
   
4. Most Americans didn't approve of Martin Luther King Jr. before his death
   
   
   
   
5. Sprawling Mayan 'cities' uncovered under Guatemala jungle using LIDAR data - "The study estimates that roughly 10 million people may have lived within the Maya Lowlands"
   
   
   
   
6. What factors are associated with population projection accuracy? by Guangqing Chi and Donghui Wang
   
   
   
   
7. The World's 15 Most Complex Subway Maps and our cognitive limits: "Multimodal transportation systems in large cities have thus already exceeded human cognitive limits and, consequently, the traditional view of navigation in cities has to be revised substantially"
   
   
   
   
8. The total seasonal snowfall in the continental US for 2017–Jan 2018, shown as a relief map. Beautiful dataviz by Garrett Dash Nelson
   
   

Data visualization of the day

Scott Kerr‏ on Twitter: "Data visualization of where I cut stuff"

image credit: Scott Kerr‏

Thanks Chico Camargo for the pointer!

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. 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)