Last October I was fortunate enough to be awarded an ESRC “Future Research Leaders” grant. These run for up to 3 years and offer the opportunity for early career researchers to focus on their research interests and personal development activities. My area of interest is the analysis and visualisation of large-scale and open demographic datasets, so the project is called Big Open Data: Mining and Synthesis (BODMAS).
The first output from the project is now ready and was developed with Oliver O’Brien. It’s called DataShine: Census and is a mapping platform for the key 2011 Census variables in England and Wales. Oliver has implemented a number of technical innovations to produce maps that are slick and seamlessly switch between geographies as you zoom. You can have custom colour palettes and even export high-resolution PDFs (go easy on this though, as it is hard work for the server!).
For more details about the project see here. It is still a work in progress with more functionality on the way so please sign up for updates or get in touch if you have any suggestions.