named is a little website that I have recently co-written as part of an ongoing ESRC-funded project on UK surnames that we are conducting here at UCL Department of Geography. I put together the website and adapted for the UK some code on generating heatmaps showing regions of unusual popularity of a surname, that was created by researchers in the School of Computing, Informatics & Decision Systems Engineering at ASU (Arizona State University) in the USA.

The website is deliberately designed to be simple to use and “stripped down” – all you do is enter your surname and the website maps where in the UK there is an unusually high number of people with that surname living. There is also an option to enter an additional surname (for example, a maiden name for yourself or your partner, or the name of a friend) – and, by combining heatmaps of both names, we try and draw out where we think you might have met each other, or grown up together.

The Research

Of most interest to us is the quality of the technique with pairs of surnames. It is well known already (for example, J A Cheshire, P A Longley (2012) Identifying Spatial Concentrations of Surnames, International Journal of GIS 26(2) pp309-325) that most traditional UK surname distributions remain surprisingly unchanged over many years – internal migration in the UK is a lot less than might be traditionally perceived. One of the research questions in the underlying project is to see whether this extends to marriages and other pairings too. So we encourage you to use this mode and help us understand and evaluate pairing surname distributions and patterns.

The site is also a useful information gathering tool – we are only in the early stages of evaluating the validity or accuracy of this method – we know it works well for certain regional UK names which are not too popular or too rare, at least. We ask for optional quick feedback following a search, so we can evaluate if the result feels right for you. So far, with the website been operational for around a week, nearly 10% of people are giving feedback, and around half of those suggest that it is good result for them. If it doesn’t highlight where you live now, it might be showing your ancestral home or other region that you have a historical link to. Or it may be showing complete rubbish – but let us know either way!

Try it out for yourself – visit here and see what it says for your surname. The site should be quite quick – it will take up to 10 seconds for names which have not already been searched, but is much faster if getting information that’s previously been searched for.

How it Works

The system is creating a probabilistic kernel density estimate (KDE), based on surname distributions (in a postcode) for an old electoral roll. It finds the relatively frequency/density of the surname compared with the general population in the area. So, in most cases, it will often highlight an area in the countryside – a sparse population, but maybe with a cluster of people with that surname. As such, it will only rarely highlight London and the other major cities of the UK, except for exceptionally urban-centric surnames, typically of foreign-origin. The method is not perfect – the “bandwidth” is fixed which means that neighbouring cities and other population fluctuations can cause false-positive results. However, we have seen enough “good” results that we think the simple has some validity, with the structure of the UK’s names.

Design

On a design perspective, I wanted to build a website that looks different from the normal “full screen slippy maps” that I have designed for a lot of my research projects. Maps are normally rectangular, so I played with some CSS and a nice JQuery visual effects library, to create a circular map instead which appears to be on the back of an information disc.

Data Quality and Privacy

The map is deliberately small and low on detail because having a more detailed map would imply a higher level of precision for the underlying names data than can actually be justified. The underlying dataset has issues but is considered to be sufficient for this purpose, as long as the spatial resolution is low. Additionally, for rare names where a result may appear for only a small number of people with that name (when in rural places) we don’t want to be flagging individual villages or houses. The data’s just not good enough for that, for many names (it may well be good for some) and it may imply we are mapping exact data over someone’s house, possibly raising privacy issues – we are not, the data is not good enough for that but by coincidence it may still happen to line up with a very local feature if it was high res.

It should give an indication into the general area where your name is unusually popular relative to the local population there (N.B. not quite the same as where your name is popular in absolute terms) but I would be wary of the quality of the result if you were identifying a particular small town or exact location.

[A little update as one user worried that it was just showing a population heatmap. This would only happen for names which have a higher relative population in more dense area of the UK. Typically, older common foreign origin names will most likely show this, as foreigners traditionally migrate to cities in the UK first. The only name so far that I’ve seen it for (I haven’t tested it for many) is Zhang which is a very common surname. Compare Zhang (left) with an overall population heatmap (using the same buffer and KDE generation as the rest of the maps):

Some newer foreign origin names show an even more pronounced urban tendency, such as Begum and Mohammed.]

More…

Try named now, or if you are interested in surnames across the world, see the older WorldNames website, and for comparisons between 1881 and 1998 distributions in the UK, see GB Names.

If named shows “No Data” and you have entered a real surname, this may be because there are only very few of you on the UK – and in this case, I show the “No Data” graphic to protect your privacy. Otherwise I’d be mapping your house – or at least, your local neighbourhood.

I attended the Cartographic Summit “The Future of Mapping” (#cartosummit) which took place at the Esri campus in Redlands, California, earlier this month. Some notes from the week, which was co-organised by Esri and the ICA (International Cartographic Association). Here are some notes about the event, which I’ll continue to add to/tweak over the next few days.

• The attendee list included some key names in modern cartography, including Cynthia Brewer, creator of the “ColorBrewer” set of colour ramps which I use widely in almost all my output mapping, such as in DataShine and many of the datasets on CDRC Maps
• It was a good natured event. The only map that came in for (justified) criticism from a presenter was – unfortunately – one of my own! Former TIME graphics director Nigel Holmes (below, showing an old US election map) was perturbed to find that my Dwelling ages map seemed to be suggesting that his old house was 50 years younger than he knew it to be. The problem was compounded by some notes he referred to in this blog, which indicated a low proportion of the dwellings on the area concerned were being mapped. It is fair criticism – the detail on my map implies a level of precision that is simply not true – my counter argument being that people like to see maps of recognisable features rather than generalised blobs representing villages and towns. I think what I need to do is revisit the mapping and indicate such low proportion areas using an “uncertainty” indication such as fading out the colour…
• James Cheshire of UCL (photo above) presented early on the conference and got straight to the point – that good maps are hard to do and, when they are done right, it’s hard to spot the effort and skill that goes into them. The proliferation of bad maps throughout the web is testament to this. He used the production process he developed for his recent book on mapping London datasets, to drive home the additional steps (shown in bold above) needed to turn a good map a great map, and reinforced the need for time – there are plenty of tools out there that allow good maps to be produced, but great maps still need care and attention.
• Alan McConchie of Stamen talked all too briefly about the wonderful basemaps produced at the studios, including the famous “Watercolour” digital map.
• Gary Gale of W3W looked ahead and reinforced the point that far from being an old-style industry, cartography has never been more current or key.
• Ken Fields of Esri gave us a dizzying tour of new cartography that he has been experimenting with over the last couple of years. He also gave a sneak peek of a very interesting looking book that he is currently working on…
• There was good academic representation in the audience, however there were some notable gaps. Commercial considerations are understandable but it was a pity there were no representation from Google, HERE, CartoDB or – especially – MapBox. The digital cartography groups within these organisations are producing great things. MapBox, in particular with its huge number of GitHub open source projects such as CartoCSS. MapBox did get a mention in one of the later talks, relating to Esri’s ongoing work to implement the MapBox Vector Tiles (MVT) format. The absence is perhaps reflective of Esri being the co-sponsor and host, who may therefore be reluctant to provide the other organisations with a high-profile platform but it still remains the fact that no discussion of modern digital cartography can be complete and representative without including the excellent work by these groups. Having said that, the small guestlist and excellent facilities provided for breakouts and discussion, allowed for good networking opportunities and gave everyone time to discuss cartographical insights with key professionals, an opportunity likely not afforded at a larger, less focused event.

My key take-away from the event is that digital cartography is now more important than ever. The plethora of tools available in the “market” now for creating maps has never been larger, but the need to create maps, which present the data fairly and impartially while engaging the viewer and encouraging them to explore, is just as critical as it has ever been. Anyone can make a map now, but creating a great map is very much a skill.

A very timely, useful conference and very much shows the need for a dedicated cartography track at the major industry and academic conferences in the GIS/geovis/datavis fields.

Here’s a map of the top method of travel to work, for each “small area” (~250 people) in the UK, for people aged 16-74 and in employment, at the time of the 2011 Census (or try the interactive, zoomable version):

The pattern is, fairly evenly, that car use (light blue) dominates except for people living in the very centre of cities, where walking to work (green) is the most popular method. The two big exceptions are London, where rail/metro travel (orange) dominates for the inner city zone, separating the walking core and car-driving outer London ring; and Cambridge, where the cyclists (red) really are king. There are some other interesting results in small areas (e.g. walking is popular in central Leicester but not in the centre of Peterborough), but overall, the map doesn’t tell you much more.

So, I’ve considered what the map would look like if we removed cars from the calculations – what form of transport is used by the people that need to work but don’t own or otherwise have access to cars, either as a driver or passenger? How does the UK commute, without cars, right now – and what might a UK landscape look like without the great rush-hour traffic jam, if the alternatives, pro-rata, were adopted? A whimsical hypothesis – cars are always going to be essential for certain kinds of commutes in certain parts of the UK – but let’s see what happens anyway, as it will still tell us something about public transport provision, city walkability and maybe attitudes to working life in general.

Here is a map of the top carless commute method for small areas, right across Britain:

(Here is the interactive, zoomable version).

Suddenly, all sorts of interesting trends emerge. In rural areas, working from home dominates – with no public transport, and motorbikes being an uncommon form of transport in the UK, this is the only option. In towns and villages, and in city centres, walking to work dominations. Both are obvious – the interesting results appear if you zoom in:

• In London, the central walking-to-work area (green) coincides almost perfectly with the congestion charge zone. Other walking areas include the large outer London town centres of Hillingdon, Croydon and Kingston that have been absorbed into the metropolis, and the traditional community of Stamford Hill.
• Rail/metro (orange) dominates throughout Zones 2-6 London and beyond.
• London has four major areas of bus dominance (purple) – Burgess Park in the south, Hackney in the north-east, the western Lea Valley in the north and a huge zone surrounding Heathrow Airport in the west. Three of these not surprisingly coincide with areas of poor rail/metro provision, but the western Lea Valley result is interesting – there are two rail lines down through this area with stopping services. However, notably, this area’s most popular employment type is cleaning – cleaners typically have to work nights, where the bus is the only public transport option.
• York versus Leeds – both have a similarly sized walking core, but then the rest of Leeds has bus users, while York’s outskirts are dominated by cyclists (red). The flatter nature of York is likely the major reason.
• Buses are pretty crucial in the Birmingham conurbation.
• Cycling dominates in almost every part of Cambridge but less so in the other famous cycling city, Oxford. In London, Hackney’s famed cycle community actually has roughly equal prominence with both bus and train/metro use.
• Stoke-on-Trent has a very large walking core, larger than for the larger cities, covering the whole area almost, rather than being surrounded by bus/cycling/train commuters as normally happens. Stoke-on-Trent is actually a conurbation of six towns, with employment scattered throughout rather than concentrated in the normal core. Alternatively this could be due to poor bus provision or a dominance of driving.
• Ilkley and Bingley like their trains – nearby Keighley and Skipton, nearby and on the same network, don’t. The former two towns perhaps act more as commuter towns for Leeds while the latter two have a tradition of more local employment.
• The very richest areas have a high proportion of people working at home (brown) – live in help, aka domestic servants? See Knightsbridge and Hampstead Garden Suburb in London, or Sutton Park near Birmingham, are two examples.
• The new towns in central Scotland seems to have a greater proportion of working-at-home than equivalent new-town areas in England.
• Fishing communities (yellow – other) are obvious in north-east Scotland:

These are just a few of the spatial patterns I’ve spotted – there are I’m sure many more interesting ones. Sometimes, removing the dominant factor reveals the interesting map.

The technique of mapping only the most dominant mode of transport has a serious flaw, in that, depending on how you merge or split other transport modes, you can significantly influence which appears “top”. I have merged some modes together (driver+car passenger, train+metro+tram, and taxi+motorbike+other, e.g. boat), hopefully in a meaningful way that shows interesting results without hiding the bigger picture. Another mitigating factor is that, where a second mode of transport has nearly as much use as the first, I include its colour too, in narrow vertical banding, and highlight this in the interactive “area information” panel.

All the maps in this article use the CDRC Maps platform, created by the Consumer Data Research Centre, to map small-area consumer and other demographic data for the UK. Because I am using Census data, I am able to map for the whole of the UK (including Scotland and Northern Ireland), as, for the Census at least, the activity is coordinated across the nations, and while the outputs are arranged differently, they are sufficiently similar to combine and use together with care. The data comes from the National Statistics agencies – the ONS, NRS and NISRA, and is Crown Copyright, licensed under the Open Government Licence.

Have a look at some other CDRC datasets mapped, download the data yourself or find out more about the CDRC.

We don’t have individual building age open data in the UK, unlike in some other countries (the data has been used to great effect in New York City and Amsterdam) but the Valuation Office Agency, which amongst other things decides council tax bandings for residential properties, has published some interesting data on how old houses are in England and Wales – it’s their “dwelling ages” dataset. A separate governmental organisation, the ONS, publishes house prices summaries, at a relatively small-area* scale, on a quarterly basis for the previous year. I have combined both these datasets into a record on CDRC Data. and have mapped them both on CDRC Maps.

The dwelling age data is supplied grouped in approximately ten-year age bands (+ a Pre-1900 catch-all) with a count of the number of houses in each band, for each small area (LSOA) in England/Wales. I’ve mapped just the modal band, that is, the band with the most number of houses in it**. In some cases, houses were steadily built in an area throughout the 20th century, so that the band assigned to that area is not actually very representative of the houses there – this can be spotted by looking at the “Classif. %” number which appears on the right.

Many UK cities show a pattern of Pre-1900 inner-city (dark grey on the map), with early 20th century houses out towards the edge (lightening blues). The “Green Belts” of the 1940s stopped this radial outward development, so, some old housing was instead overhauled to build 1960s-70s housing estates (shown in yellow) and more recently, the urban core has seen much of the recent housebuilding activity. This shows up on the map as an area of red in the centre of many cities. There are some exceptions – Milton Keynes is a large, and new, town, its map showing mainly yellows and reds.

Not all areas are constrained by Green Belts but some have other, physical constraints, such as the sea. Weston-super-Mare, for example, has steadily expanded westwards over the last 150 years: