A time where ‘real world’ conferences are a memory of the past is a good opportunity to look at the wealth of material that has been put online instead. Here is one of my talks that has recently been put online. It’s a four-minute ‘Lightning talk’ given at last year’s Anniversary Annual Conference of the Global Young Academy. Lightning Talks are giving a brief overview of a topic aimed at a broader audience, and here I am – obviously – talking about mapping and cartograms: Continue reading
Category Archives: conferences
Call for Papers: The Challenges and Potentials of Contemporary Atlases
Call for Paper and Panel Contributions
The Challenges and Potentials of Contemporary Atlases
Association of American Geographer’s (AAG) Conference 2018
New Orleans, 10 – 14 April 2018
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Beyond fire and ice: Mapping Iceland in the 21st Century
Iceland and maps have a long tradition in the history of cartography. From the first maps of the country in the 16th century (including works from cartographers such as Ortelius and Mercator, also featuring some nice sea monsters) to today’s advanced digital mappings of Iceland’s diverse natural environment (such as this innovative mapping of water in Iceland or this quite beautiful representation of contour lines), Iceland never really had a lack of quite good cartographic works. Much less covered than the natural environment are the social landscapes of the country, such as this just recently updated version of a gridded population cartogram of the country where each grid cell is proportional to the number of people living in that area:
Mediterranean Refugees (March 2016 Update)
This year’s New Teacher Subject Day organised by the Prince’s Teaching Institute took place at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls near Manchester. For the geography teachers the focus was on the topic of Geopolitics and Borders to which I contributed a talk about ‘The Power of Maps: A Cartographic Journey along the World’s Borders’ (see slides at the end of this page) and also organised a practical session where the participants learned to create their own cartogram. Related to the theme and linking to the content of my talk, this cartogram was an update of the Refugee arrivals map from 2015 using the latest data by UNHCR. The following map shows the number of refugee arrivals by sea in the Mediterranean in the first months of 2016 (as of March, 3):
“Calling Abidjan” – estimating population distribution through analysis of mobile phone call data records
Big data, big challenge? Together with Harald Sterly of the University of Cologne I presented a little piece of research in the Extended Spatial Analytics session of the German Geography Congress (Deutscher Kongress für Geographie) in Berlin. The project “Calling Abidjan” that we worked on with Kouassi Dongo of Université de Cocody-Abidjan was started after we successfully applied for participation of the D4D Challenge. According to the initiator Orange telecommunications ‘Data for Development’ is “an innovation challenge open on ICT Big Data for the purposes of societal development”. The project allowed us to work with anonymised mobile phone data from individual call records by Orange in the country of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast).
We were interested in investigating, what non-computer scientists with a social science and urban planning background can do with such data in a more contextual rather that technically driven way and therefore explored how mobile phone call records can be used to better estimate population distribution.
For our analysis we used anonymised call data records consisting of information about the base station, timestamp, and caller ID produced by the approximately 500.000 Orange Télecom users in the country. There were 1079 base stations at the time the data was generated and we were able to work with data covering 183 days. The dataset consisted of 13GB of raw data which some would perhaps call ‘Big Data’ (though I personally do not like this term for many reasons).
The following two (draft) maps give an insight into the results. The purple circles show the distribution and density of population estimates that we derived using only mobile phone call records dataset. To better see the correlation with what other population data tells us about where people live, we did not only produce a normal land area map (on the left, also displaying some basic idea of the topography in the country) but also showed the data on a gridded population cartogram which we generated from the LandScan population grid, the perhaps most detailed population dataset currently available on a globally consistent high-resolution basis:
Urbane Veränderungsprozesse in Stadtregionen Deutschlands
Read/cite the original publication here:
Hennig, B.D. (2018): The growth and decline of urban agglomerations in Germany. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. DOI:10.1177/2F0308518X18798835
Hennig, B.D. (2018): The growth and decline of urban agglomerations in Germany. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. DOI:10.1177/2F0308518X18798835
This is a German-language poster contribution looking at processes of change in the major urban agglomerations in Germany and novel ways of visualising these using cartogram visualisation techniques. Continue reading