Effective communication and cartography

I have been thinking a lot recently about using maps as effective tools for visual communication of data. Chen et al. (2014) wrote that visualization of data should be about getting your message across in a time-efficient manner, which Kent (2005) stated depends upon producing aesthetically pleasing results. All maps (being one form of data visualization) are imperfect models of the world (as all models are imperfect) and we must take care to make sure that our maps communicate the messages we wish to express effectively.

Without wishing to get unduly political, I want to work through these ideas using the example of this summer’s “Brexit” vote. Data on the referendum results can be found here and data on UK boundary lines here. There are many (infinite?) different potential ways of visualising this data spatially, but I am going to explain the messages I see in a few examples here.

First up, we have a simple rendering of the results using the district divisions by which the data was originally counted and parcelled up, in which the saturation of the yellows (remain) and blues (leave) show the percentage lead each vote had in districts which each side “won”:


Yellow and blue have been used as that seems to be the convention settled on by most of our media. This map shows which areas felt particularly strongly one way or the other about the question asked and works well in that regard. However, it also gives a somewhat misleading message, as some of the high value districts are of relatively low population density. As an alternative then, we can keep the same division into “leaver” and “remainer” districts, but instead use the shading to show population density:


This map loses the nuance of showing how strong the vote was in either direction, but gains something by showing which districts have more people living in them. Most notable is the stark difference between the districts in eastern England around The Wash, which are of low population density (for the UK!), but which felt very strongly that the UK should leave the EU.

We can also look at the result in much more stark terms. The recent High Court decision has increased the likelihood of their being a Parliamentary vote on invoking Article 50, so I wanted to see which way the various constiuencies fell in terms of “leave” or “remain”. This is not simple, however, as the results were reported using districts, which often do not match constiuencies. As such, I reapportioned the vote from districts between consituencies on the basis of spatial area (e.g. if a constiuency covered half a district, it would receive half the votes). This is imperfect, as population density is not uniform across any district, but was the best I could do with the data to hand. The results show that, if Parliament does get to vote on Article 50 and MPs vote as their constituents voted, then “Leave” will comfortably win (Northern Ireland has not been included, but does not have enough MPs to make a difference either way):


All of these maps work reasonably well at expressing one element of the data, but I wanted to come up with a visualization that produced a more complex picture of the results yet without abandoning geographic space (i.e. I did not want to use a cartogram):


This final map reworks the results into hexagonal spatial bins, using the same method as when I reworked the results into constiuencies (i.e. assignment by spatial area overlap). Here, the blue / yellow shading has returned to showing the strength of the result, but we can now also see data on population at the same time through the thickness / blackness of the lines around the hexagons. I feel that this map does a pretty good job of showing the distribution of the vote (spatially, strength-wise, and population-wise) whilst still allowing people to locate themselves reasonably well geographically (which would not be the case with a cartogram). Hexagons have been preferred over squares largely to their visual appeal and due to the fact that humans have a tendency to see false straight lines in data binned into square-based grids.

Whatever you think of the referendum result, I hope that my worked example has helped to explain how making a map is not always a simple task. Careful thought about audience, message, and data structure needs to go into any visualisation if effective communication is to be achieved. I hope that my final map succeeds in that task!

Chris Green


Chen, M., L. Floridi, and R. Borgo. 2014. What is visualization really for? The Philosophy of Information Quality. Springer Synthese Library Volume 358, 75-93

Kent, A.J. 2005. Aesthetics: a lost cause in cartographic theory? Cartographic Journal 42(2), 182-188

All maps contain Ordance Survey data (C) Crown copyright and database right 2016

New paper: modelling mass data

Our new paper has just gone up for online first access. It’s available here if you have access to the Archaeological Journal via a library / university:


It’s about our experiments in modelling EngLaID datasets on a broad scale, with a mild focus on population density. It also covers some issues discussed here (Affordance; Pottery I, II).

Playing with Ptolemy

Ever since I was an undergraduate (and attempted to write a “mental geography” of Roman Britain for my dissertation), I have been interested in Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography. Ptolemy was an Alexandrian Greek and his Geography dates to the mid second century AD: it contains coordinates from which it is possible to make maps of the entire known world at that time, including data representing the earliest surviving reasonably accurate survey of the British Isles. For the purposes of the EngLaId Atlas, that I am currently working on, I decided to see if I could plot Ptolemy’s Britain (or Albion as he called it) over the modern OS map.

To do so, I copied out the coordinates for Ptolemy’s places (representing points along coastlines, islands, and major settlements) from Rivet & Smith 1979. I suspect that there may be one or two typos in their lists (as a couple of the points in the final maps are not quite in the same place as they are on Rivet & Smith’s map), but I am not too worried about that for now. The task was then to convert Ptolemy’s coordinates so that they could be plotted onto the OS National Grid.

The first job was to correct for Ptolemy’s underestimate of the circumference of the planet (it was this underestimate that caused Columbus to be so confident about being able to reach the Indies by sailing west, thus accidentally discovering the Americas): to do so, all of the coordinates were first multiplied by 0.798. I then needed to recentre the coordinates so that they related to modern latitude / longitude: I used London / Londinium as a fixed point in both Ptolemy and the modern world, on the assumption that the provincial capital of Britannia ought to be relatively precisely located in Ptolemy’s data. This involved adding 8.41 degrees to each latitude measure and subtracting 16.06 degrees from each longitude measure.

I then created a shapefile in ArcGIS from the coordinate list using the WGS84 projection settings and then reprojected the  map into OSGB 1936, ArcGIS’s representation of the OS National Grid. The points were then filtered out into islands, settlements, and coastline vertices. I had given the coastline points an “order” field (based upon the order of coordinates in Ptolemy) and used the Points to Line tool in ArcGIS to convert them to a line. I then converted the line to a polygon using Feature to Polygon. Finally, a few extra vertices were added to the coastline polygon using the editing tools in order to ensure that the settlement points were all on dry land. Here is the result:


Several things jump out. The most noticeable (and long commented on) is Ptolemy’s rotation of Scotland. Why he did this has been the subject of much debate, possibly being due to him believing that a N-S Scotland would extend too far north or possibly being due to a lack of reliable data on travel times through those non-Imperial lands. The latter is rather key to understanding the Geography: whereas latitude was fairly straightforward to calculate in the past, without chronometers longitude was much more difficult and relied largely upon calculations made using travel time itineraries. We can see the results of this in the way that most of the settlements in England / Wales are reasonably precise in their latitude (N-S) but much more imprecise in their longitude (E-W): York forms a good example. Overall, considering the time when it was constructed, Ptolemy’s Geography contains an impressive representation of Britain (south of Scotland).

I then experimented with a couple of transformations to see if I could improve the plotting onto the National Grid. First, I tried rotating the data so that the north of England more closely aligned with the modern map (actually an affine transformation using London, York and Chester as fixed points, so the geometry is slightly deformed, especially for Scotland):


The result is not really all that great, as the south of England then becomes much less closely aligned with the modern map. I also tried a rubbersheet transformation, using London as a fixed point and moving Ptolemy’s York onto modern York:


This turns the map into a really quite close approximation of the modern English / Welsh coastline, with the exceptions of the immense length of the south west and the rather stunted East Anglia. However, as it disturbs the geometrical relationship between Ptolemy’s coordinates, I decided in the end that my first model was probably the best: after all, I could keep adding points to the transformation until everything mapped perfectly onto the modern geography, but what would be the point of that? I would just be recreating the OS map.

This was just a short experiment for the purposes of debate and making a nice map. It seems likely that I may have done something spatially naive in plotting the data using the WGS84 settings, but the end results are rather pleasing in any event.

Chris Green


Rivet, A.L.F. & C. Smith. 1979 The Place-names of Roman Britain. London: Batsford.

The maps contain Ordnance Survey data (OpenData). (C) Crown Copyright and Database Right 2016.

Field systems (IV)






















Chris Green



EngLaId conquers Paris!!

We are very proud of our project artist, Miranda Creswell, whose Paris exhibition in Le CentQuatre (sponsored by NEARCH) opened on 14 February.

The exhibition can be viewed until 30 April 2016.

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For more information:


(English-language information: http://www.104.fr/english/)


French artist Nathalie Joffre also deserves a special mention, as her work was to a large degree inspired by a residency in Oxford, where she met and engaged with Oxford-based archaeologists on the Dorchester-on-Thames training excavations.

Finally, also see Tim Dowling’s column in this week’s Guardian – ‘the friend’s exhibition’ is, indeed, this very same event! http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/20/tim-dowling-valentines-day-paris

Field system orientation (III)








Chris Green

Big, Bad (?) Data: new EngLaId publication

We are very happy to announce the latest EngLaId publication, a joint article by project DPhils Dan Stansbie and Sarah Mallet, in the latest 2015 issue of Medieval Settlement Research. Dan and Sarah discuss identity and landscape in early medieval England through a Big Data-focus on food..

Perfect Christmas reading!

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