This April has been the wettest April on record in the UK, while parts of the country are also in official drought – leading to headlines of the wettest drought on record.
The miserable weather was (is) a good opportunity to finally produce a high-resolution version of the map series that I created during my PhD research and which I presented at last year’s conference of the Society of Cartographers in Plymouth. Continue reading
Political Landscapes of London
Londoners will decide on their new mayor on the 3rd of May in this year’s mayoral election. Directly elected mayors were introduced in England in 2000 when Labour candidate Ken Livingstone was elected the first Mayor of London. He therefore also became the first to have this position in England under the Local Government Act 2000 introduced by the then Labour government under Prime Minister Tony Blair. Meanwhile, other cities have followed, and more will have a referendum on the issue on the same day Londoners go to the polls this year. Continue reading
In Focus: London’s political landscapes
Ahead of this year’s vote we had a look at the geography of the 2008 London mayoral election. In an article for the “In Focus” section of Political Insight (April 2012, Volume 3, Issue 1) Danny Dorling and I analysed the patterns of first-preference votes at the last election in the UK’s capital city.
The map series that I created for this feature displays the distribution of first preference votes shares for each respective party that put up a candidate. This allows not only to see the eventual outcome (which resulted in the then mayor Ken Livingstone of Labour being put into second place but the current mayor Boris Johnson of the Conservatives), but also gave an impression of the distribution of preferences for the smaller political parties within the city, as most voters put their main party preference into their first vote, while giving their second preference to a stronger candidate of the larger parties. The maps are based on a gridded population cartogram of London (as featured in the London in Maps book). This is a preview of the maps that we created for the article (a larger version of this map can be found here):
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20 years of German exports
Europe’s Economic Powerhouse Drifts East read a headline in the New York Times last year, referring to the shifting economies not only within the European Union as shown in a series of cartograms on this website, but also in a wider sense. As the NYT states: “Last year [i.e. 2010], the euro area’s share of German exports fell to 41 percent from 43 percent in 2008, while Asia’s share rose to 16 percent from 12 percent, according to Bundesbank figures. During the same period, exports to Asia rose by €28 billion, while exports to the euro area fell by the same amount.” Continue reading
The Emerald Island
This image of the day in NASA’s Earth Observatory is an extremely rare display of a cloud-free Irish island. NASA says:
It is easy to see from this true-color image why Ireland is called the Emerald Isle. Intense green vegetation, primarily grassland, covers most of the country except for the exposed rock on mountaintops. Ireland owes its greenness to moderate temperatures and moist air. The Atlantic Ocean, particularly the warm currents in the North Atlantic Drift, gives the country a more temperate climate than most others at the same latitude.
That image coincided with St Patrick’s day last year, for which I created an Irish-Island version of the population cartogram series (see the Ireland Population Cartogram here). Continue reading
Mercator revisited
The 5th of March 2012 marks the 500th birthday of Gerardus Mercator, the creator of the world map that profoundly changed our views of the world. He was not the only one who worked on a conformal map projection in the 16th century, which was still an age of exploration and discovery. But he was the first to do the maths right and complete a world map that allowed ships to navigate around the planet by its ability to represent lines of constant course. That makes the Mercator projection a milestone in the history of cartography and remains one of the central map projections up to the present day. Continue reading