The long history of using maps to hold water companies to account
James Cheshire, UCL Southern Water was handed a record fine of £90 million in July 2021 after pleading guilty to illegally discharging sewage along the rivers a...
Tag: maps
Anxiety and Mapping the Climate Crisis
Many of the maps I have created in recent years address the climate crisis and I’ve been asked a number of times about if I feel powerless in the face of ...
Being creative is reason enough to try different data visualization
A simple line chart might be all you need to communicate the patterns in a dataset, but it might not be given a second glance. Getting the viewer to work a litt...
How the Victorians Mapped London’s Cholera
It is, of course, John Snow who is credited with using maps to demonstrate that the clusters of deaths from cholera in London’s Soho during London’s...
Joy Division, Population Surfaces and Pioneering Electronic Cartography
There has been a resurgence of interest in data visualizations inspired by Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover. These so-called “Joy Plots&...
London: The Information Capital
I am pleased announce that London: The Information Capital will be published on the 30th October. It is a book bursting with maps and graphics about the world&#...
In Maps We Trust
Of all the different types of data visualisation, maps* seem to have the best reputation. I think people are much less likely to trust a pie chart, for example,...
Mapped: British, Spanish and Dutch Shipping 1750-1800
I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which contains digitised information from the log books of ships (mostly from Britain, France, Spain and The Neth...
The Power of Comparison: Just How Big Is It?
If I said a country was 1594719800 metres squared it would mean a lot less to you than if I said it was about the size of Greater London (so long as you ...
My Week in Maps
This week has been a busy one with the “publication” of a couple of maps I have been involved with alongside the circulation of a few cartographic g...