Storyscape

Check out the year's end issue of this ESRI mapping newsletter with lots of StoryMap related news...

Data after Dark

Via Professor James Cheshire on LinkedIn.

Today we've published DATA AFTER DARK: a huge piece of work that shines a much needed light on the geography and lived experiences of London's 1.3 million night workers. 

Check it out!

https://dataafterdark.org/

There's too many findings for one post, so for now I want to thank all the night workers who responded to our surveys and who spoke to our researchers and to thank the wider team and supporters of this milestone project.

The research looks like being really useful, and perhaps the night needs to have a greater presence in the geographies that we teach - particularly at this time of year when many of us who are teaching leave home in the dark and arrive home in the dark.

The site includes a very nicely presented research report on night-time working and the night-time economy, as well as centring the voices of night-time workers.

Download the research report here (PDF download)

From the website:

Although night workers make up a little over a quarter of London’s total workers, they are noticeably under-represented in traditional sources of data. Data gathering efforts, and the policy insights that flow from them, still presume the regular “9 to 5” working day, but this is increasingly unrepresentative of people's lived experiences and is not fit for purpose for the millions who work when many of us are enjoying a night out or sleeping.

Data After Dark represents the most comprehensive studies of London’s night workers completed to date, spanning three detailed pieces of work:

• Voices of Night Workers: in-depth, documented, night worker-led discussions
• Didobi Night Worker Report: an extensive survey of workers and their employers
• Mapping Night Work: the innovative spatial analysis of large datasets

Data After Dark was initiated by the UCL Social Data Institute with collaborators from the UCL Urban Laboratory, The Bartlett School of Architecture, the Geographic Data Service and Didobi Limited.

The research was supported by the Mayor of London. It received support, advice and funding from UCL Innovation & Enterprise.

Glacier Melt Visualisation

This nice interactive infographic visualises the ice loss from Switzerland's glaciers.

It is one of several from the VisQuill site, developed by Dr. Benjamin Niedermann.

Going where the car doesn't...

This is an interesting story on the mapping of Britain away from the roads.

Here's the story of Dr. Uy Hoang:

Dr. Uy Hoang, 51, decided to act after realizing he couldn’t see his local town path online and now he is single-handedly mapping Britain's waterways as a hobby.

He has taken a staggering 300,000 snaps and uploaded them to the online mapping service - making him the most prolific contributor in Britain and ninth in the world, he says.

Starting in 2015, he has spent the last 10 years covering the nation's rivers and canals - walking an estimated 1,600 miles.

Uy, from London, says he’s covered at least 75% of the nation's canal network so far.

New ESRI GIS support materials

Jason Sawle shared this on World GIS Day.

Part of a forthcoming set of resources for students and teachers to explore the world.

Sharing the blog on Substack

I've been sharing my blogs over on my Substack Newsletter. This comes out weekly and provides an update on blog posts, projects, news, books, images and events linked to geography.

Subscribe here.

Digital assessment - some trials

This is coming soon...

Katie Hall has shared some of her recent work exploring digital assessment options.

She has been working with Qualifications Wales to look at a possible model for doing this.

Nathan Evans from Qualifications Wales has written a blog post about progress to date.

This includes some videos of the tasks that learners were asked to do.

And then you can have a go yourself at doing the activity here.

250 000 page views

Well it's taken a while to get here... this blog is one of my older ones... thanks for your interest and for reading.

Maps on Vinyl

Coming to the UK later this month is a book by Damien Saunder.

It is called Maps on Vinyl.

Description from the author/publisher.

Visit the website and scroll down to see lots of examples.

Presenting 415 album covers – beautifully reproduced, expertly laid out and accompanied by deeply researched text – Maps on Vinyl will especially appeal to map enthusiasts, vinyl junkies, music fans, graphic designers and artists.

The book is the brainchild of renowned Australian cartographer Damien Saunder, whose expertise has been utilised by Apple, National Geographic, Earth (the world’s largest atlas) and even Roger Federer. A keen crate-digger, he has amassed possibly the world’s most extensive private collection of records featuring maps on their covers, resulting in this one-of-a-kind book. 


Records by artists including Madonna, Oasis, Coldplay, Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, XTC, MC5, Queen, New Order, James Brown, Brian Eno and Weezer are featured, with cover art created by many giants of the design world, including Peter Saville, Curtis McNair, Richard Gray, Alton Kelly, Stanley Mouse, Neville Garrick, Roger Dean and Pedro Bell.

The records headlined span music from 1939 to today, and the book is divided into eight chapters highlighting different aspects of the collection – ‘C(art)ography’, ‘We Built This City’, ‘On the Road’, ‘African Beats’, ‘Astroworlds’, ‘Ocean Whispers’, ‘Maps with Attitude’ and ‘Music from Here’.

Maps on Vinyl is a beautiful artefact, but it’s also an important historical and cultural document, revealing how maps have been used in album cover design to reinforce a lyrical story, share a political view, express concern for the state of the world or creatively identify the origins of the music and the people who make it.

There's a Guardian piece about the author here.

It provides more details about the book.

The selection criteria for the book was strict: no landscape paintings; no satellite photography. “A map had to be an abstraction of a geographic form – real or fictitious – and show spatial relationships. That distinction helped narrow the collection.”

While maps are often celebrated for their beauty, they can also contain layers of meaning, says Saunder. “Even the most basic shapes of countries can draw out a lot of feelings – positive and negative.”

It also provides a few examples of maps that were included...

Such as this cover from Talking Heads.

All proceeds from the sale of the book are going to Support Act, an organisation helping musicians deal with the emotional, physical and financial challenges rife in the industry.

I shall certainly be getting a copy of this.

National Geographic's MapMaker

Jason Sawle has shared ten teaching tips for National Geographic's MapMaker.

Here's one for example that I used to make a lot more use of than now....

Climate Shift Index

The Climate Shift Index was mentioned by ITV Anglia presenter Chris Page in his forecast last night.

It is produced by Climate Central who perform a similar role to Carbon Brief in providing reports in the arena of Climate Change.

This work is significant as the Trump administration is deleting and stopping access to research and reports on Climate Change in the USA. This will not stop it happening by the way... it will just make it harder to prepare, and make the impacts even worse... and not just in the US.

Check out the Global Map showing how much the climate has shifted.

The Climate Shift Index (CSI) is a system that quantifies the influence of climate change on local daily temperatures around the world.

The Climate Shift Index ranges from -5 to +5. Positive levels indicate temperatures that are becoming more likely due to climate change (negative scores indicate conditions that are becoming less likely).

A CSI of level 5 means that a temperature is occurring at least 5 times more frequently when compared to a world without human-caused carbon pollution. This temperature would be very difficult to encounter in a world without climate change – not necessarily impossible, just highly unlikely.

Here's how to interpret the scale from 1-5 and in the negative too.

And here is the interpretation guide for specific numbers. 

Zoom in to your local area to see what the likely impact of climate change is on the weather in your area as the summer goes on....

Images: Climate Central

How big is Glastonbury?

Always good to have little map 'experiments' / projects like this appearing. Glastonbury's gates opened yesterday.

Glastonbury is big. Fifteen years ago today, I was there... in the heat, working with the Geography Collective in the Greek Kids Zone. I've blogged about it before - search the blog for 'Glastonbury'.

This map shows you how big, although from my experience it felt quite a lot larger than it is shown here. I think there are other areas still beyond what is shown here - whether car parking or additional camping and the security zone.

It's made by Geoffrey Prytherch.

Here's Ely compared to the site.

And here's one of my images from up near the letters... at night, it looks pretty awesome too. This was sunset on the 24th of June.

Image: Alan Parkinson - shared on Flickr under CC license

Map of the Week blog

The Map of the Week blog has been around for quite a while - dating back to 2005 (which is about the time I started some of my blogs). Produced by Dug from Massachusetts, USA.

Why not lose yourself by digging into the archive for a few hours...

Young Geographer of the Year Competition

A chance for your students to create an ESRI StoryMap.

It's that time of year again for the launch of the Young Geographer of the Year category. 

This annual competition is run by the Royal Geographical Society.

The Young Geographer of the Year is the Society’s annual competition which recognises the outstanding work of the next generation of geographers. With its age ranges spanning the primary years to A Level, the competition encourages thoughtful and creative answers to the competition’s theme which is set each year.

The Society encourages schools to run their own in-house competition and then send their top 10 entries into the international competition. The Young Geographer competition has been running for over 20 years and every year thousands of children across the world take part.
2025 competition

The theme for the Young Geographer of the Year competition 2025 is:

Understanding islands

Let’s take a closer look at the World’s islands.

It is estimated that our planet contains almost 670,000 islands, of which around 11,000 are permanently inhabited. Islands have a unique geography; their landscapes and coastlines vary massively – some are home to volcanoes; others are barely above sea level. Some are barren, deserts or rocky outcrops, others lush vegetation havens for a range of unique wildlife and plant species. There are islands seen by many as popular holiday destinations, and there are others that are inaccessible or many miles from civilisation. Every island is unique, and every island has its challenges.

The geography of islands is an interesting one. 

Some are threatened by climate change and issues such as sea level rise, and through this are embroiled in the geopolitics of the climate emergency and the mitigation strategies implemented through both international policies and local-level action. The people who live on islands face a range of socio-economic, cultural or historical challenges, from over-use of their towns and cities by tourists, to access to resources, clean water or adequate living conditions. The ‘ownership’ of some islands is contested; some are protected, others are fought over because of their geopolitical or strategic significance. In some places, islands are being created to meet the need for more space to satisfy our growing population. By exploring and understanding islands, including the island we live on, we can unlock a multitude of geographical themes and connections across people, places and environments.

The Society invites you to create a poster (Esri StoryMap or poster for KS5 entrants) to explore islands and highlight the geographical themes, challenges and solutions that connect across both human and physical geography to make islands unique. We are looking for eye catching, creative and informative posters and StoryMaps that delve into the socio-economic, cultural, political and physical aspects of a range of islands, showcasing their features and exploring how islands can be connected through the challenges that they face and the solutions they use to address those challenges. 

Your posters and StoryMaps should think about geographical themes across people, places and environments.

Image: Alan Parkinson, waves on Reynisfjara beach - shared on Flickr

ESRI Visualiser

If you need to show students the world and have a free GIS / Visualisation tool, check out ESRI's Visualiser.

This is a free tool with no login. Maps can be viewed in 2D or as a 3D sphere.

There are some measuring tools, and also some layers that can be added e.g. ocean currents.