Visualisations of a World in Crisis
A Picture of Open Access
The Open Access Week is promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. It goes into its 5th year in 2011. The community claims that
Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.
Following up the Open Access Africa 2010 conference in Nairobi/Kenya Rania Baleela and Pablo de Castro Martín have created a presentation the global development of Open Access (and draw a special focus on the situation in African countries). They used a number of worldmapper maps to make their case. In addition I created a new map for them that shows the number of activities by country along the SPARC-organised 4th edition of the Open Access Week (Oct 18-24th, 2010). This is the newly created map on the OA 2010 activities (the full presentation can be accessed online in the e-archive of the University of Madrid, Pablo has also written a brief report about OA Africa at the BioMed Central Blog):
British Views of the World 2010
2010 is over. An interesting year that has seen the advent of a big society in Britain, some exciting sports events (and with retaining the Ashes, even England made a last-minute win), a lot of snow, and many other things to remember (and to forget). This time of the year is review time. In map-ish terms, cartography and maps appear to become more and more popular again, not least because there are so many people out there taking on the new open data that keeps leaking (mostly on purpose, but sometimes by accident…). Therefore, a review of 2010 in maps is inevitable, and James Cheshire did so on his website which is well worth a look (even if that may be a little British-centric): 2010 mapped.
And here comes my final map for 2010: A look at the British view of the world in 2010. To understand how British people perceive the events on the globe, one can look at how frequently a country has been mentioned in major news stories. The following maps do exactly this by visualising the number of news items on the website of the British Newspaper The Guardian (data derived from their Data store). Speaking of the Guardian, their website also features a nice interactive review-creator where you can create a personalised interactive review of this year – try it out if you feel that all other of the plenty reviews out there covered the wrong stories.
Here is the first map that also takes the domestic news stories from the United Kingdom into consideration – for obvious reasons the UK dominates this version of the map:
Britain in Snow
Another winter, another big freeze in the United Kingdom and Ireland: This winter has started early and brought the first significant snow cover to the British Isles at the beginning of December. Coming with a breeze of Arctic air from the North-East, the snow made its way down to the south of Great Britain, with Aqua satellite catching this moment at a time when some parts of the South-West still managed to escape the icing. This image from the NASA’s Earth Observatory shows the snow lingered in Great Britain and Ireland on December 8, 2010 with a few clouds over Northern Ireland and the South-East of England. To show the impact on the people living there, I reprojected the image using the gridded equal-population projection which transforms the picture according to the population distribution. Especially the snow-free areas in the South as well as in the Liverpool-Manchester region strike out in the population projection, showing that at this time the most severe affected areas were the less populated (what then was about to change, with the second cold spell bringing much more snow and ice to the more populated areas of the UK just in time for Christmas):
In Focus: Government Debt
A map showing the Europe’s government debt is now featured in the “In Focus” section of Political Insight journal (December 2010, Volume 1, Issue 3). The accompanying article written by Danny Dorling and me explains why the UK’s deficit is particularly high.
Here are the bibliographic details:
- Dorling, D. and Hennig, B. D. (2010). In Focus: Government Debt. Political Insight1 (3): 106.
Article online (Wiley)
More debt maps can be found here.
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