Automatic Knowledge

This is a short blog post about what I'm doing next, now that I have moved on from my job as a professor at the University of Sheffield. It's not going to be a self-indulgent retrospective, it's more for information and a bit of reflection. From 1 September 2020 I'll be working on my own business, Automatic Knowledge Ltd. 

Take a look at the website to find out more, but I'm going to be doing similar kinds of things (maps, stats, analysis) though instead of working mainly within academia I'm mostly going to be doing this with other organisations and businesses. I was doing some of this already and in fact it was taking up more and more of my time so I decided it was time to make the move. 

Oh, but since I really like teaching (and learning) I'm going to continue to offer my QGIS courses - see the Training part of the website for more on that too. I've already done these for Savills, the BBC, the FT, Regeneris and more.

The Automatic Knowledge website

What's that you say? Brand identity? Corporate logo? Well, I'm not very big on all that but if you see something that looks like this (below) on a map or graphic or chart from now on you'll know it comes from me and my team (talking of which, I'll be working with a couple of former associates from now on, as projects require it).

Why 'automatic knowledge'? Read more here

People keep asking (really) so I'm opening a small print shop as well

Anyway, that's what's next and I'm very much looking forward to it - expanding my consultancy work, building on existing relationships and making new connections. 

Get in touch via the Contact page on the website, via LinkedIn or via Twitter if you want to start a conversation about consulting work.

Free stuff

In my previous job I liked to share as many free, useful resources as I could with the wider data and spatial analysis community, and I'll continue to do that with Automatic Knowledge. It's a small gesture but I know many people have found my resources useful - because they've told me about it. So, on my new website, I have also added a Resources section where you can find the following datasets. It's all already available as open data but in all cases I have added to the original with useful extras. I will also continue to try to give back to the open source GIS world in the form of financial support to the QGIS project. I've done this before and in fact that's the only time Automatic Knowledge has been seen online previously, though in this example it was before I set it up as a formal business. I'd only used that name for anonymous donations in the past.

• A set of geofiles (shp, gpkg, geojson) of all places in Great Britain - more than 40,000 of them. There are also some more useful goodies here, like a fully-formed QGIS project and instructions on how to style and filter the data.
• My popular 'All buildings in Great Britain' layer. You can get this online already in small chunks but I have put it all together and also added for each feature information on which local authority it is in and the floor area of the building footprint. This is a geopackage (gpkg) only because of the size.
• A 'UK local authorities (2020) with data' file. I've added a number of fields to the dataset, including ones to indicate what country or region an area is in, plus the latest ONS population estimates (mid-2019) for each area, broken down by single year of age. There is also a field indicating what kind of area each local authority is (e.g. London Borough, Unitary Authority, Non-metropolitan District). I've made this layer available in shp, gpkg and geojson formats.

This is a preview of the GB buildings file

Looking back, just a bit

I'm not really one for looking backwards, or for sentimentality, but it appears that I worked at the University of Sheffield for a total of 4,320 days (about 12 years). I'm also not one for deleting emails and I can tell you that I received a total of 190,020 during that time (using 71.67 GB of inbox storage space, despite deleting tons of attachments). 

Using a sophisticated mathematical formula to crunch the numbers, I can tell you that this equates to an average of 44 emails a day. Now, in the early days I wasn't getting as many as I did at the end, but I tried to answer them all, honestly. But really, why am I talking about email? I have no idea.

Anyway, if you email me now at my University address you'll just get an out of office (forever) autoreply and a picture of the Western Highlands of Scotland. 

A typical blue sky day in the Highlands

If you were a student during my time at the University of Sheffield, I just want to say thanks. Teaching and interacting with students was one of the best things about it and I feel like I learned a lot about myself, life, others, and so much more. I'm still in touch with many former students, so I hope that continues - even if it's just to ask me for a reference. I 100% enjoyed marking every piece of work you all submitted (plus or minus 75%). 

I'm so proud that so many former students have gone on to do great things, or just to figure out that they really weren't that into urban studies, planning or GIS in the first place - there are many roads, and finding the one you want to be on can take time! I can't take any credit for this, but it's good to have been able to join you for part of the journey.

Talking of students, see below for a 2009 Lille field trip photo - quite low resolution, unfortunately, but then again it was taken on one of those custom-built 'cameras' we all used to take photos with. 

I can't name absolutely everyone because the resolution is too low, but I will at least give a shout out to Rebecca (far left), Grant (front, crouching), Isaac (double wave, far right), Liz (middle-ish) and Justine (also middle). As for the small boy in the plant bit of the sculpture, I have no idea who he is but he wasn't a Sheffield planner. Talking of the sculpture, it's the Shangri-la tulips sculpture by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama in the French city of Lille, right by the Eurostar station (the glass building in the lower background).

Click to enlarge - or click here instead

Right, that's more than enough of that.

I'm going to take a very short break and maybe do a little bit of Highlands and Islands touring before I get back to work on the projects I have lined up, but feel free to get in touch if you think I can help with any analysis, maps, stats or research.

New Book: GIS for Planning and the Built Environment

A bit of a different blog post today, because a new GIS book by Ed Ferrari and me has been published. It’s called GIS for Planning and the Built Environment: An Introduction to Spatial Analysis and it’s an intro text aimed at anyone with an interest in GIS and the built environment, from geography and planning students to aspiring architects and landscape majors, plus people working in professional practice. We’ve included examples from across the world, from the bustling streets of Manhattan to the zig-zagging ski slopes of Austria. We hope you’ll see that we love GIS and what it can do, but we recognise that not everyone shares our passion, so when we were writing the book we also had one eye on the reluctant GISer - that’s why you can use our book to dip in and out of topics as and when you need to. 

Front cover

Want to know how to make better maps? Okay, no problem, head straight to Chapter 6. Desperate to know more about Waldo Tobler (pictured below with the authors in Santa Barbara on a previous GIS  world tour), his famous ‘First Law of Geography’ and why everyone goes on about it? Then head directly to Chapter 7. You'll also learn about the much less well known 'Second Law'. Want a good overview of contemporary GIS for planning and the built environment more generally? Excellent! Read the whole book. Looking for more information on a specific technical topic? Then our comprehensive index is the place to begin.

The authors, with the late Professor Waldo Tobler

There are many GIS texts out there, from the comprehensive to the highly technical. Ours sits somewhere in the middle as what we think is an accessible, easy-to-read reference for anyone with an interest in the topic as it relates to the built environment and planning more generally. We begin by establishing the book’s aims, and set out our hopes that anyone who reads the book will:

• Obtain the knowledge, skill and experience to understand how the spatial analysis of data about the ‘real world’ can be used to understand planning problems;
• Be able to apply a broad range of spatial analytic and visualisation techniques using industry standard GIS software packages; and
• Understand how maps and data can be used effectively as evidence for planning- related issues.

In the introduction, we also include a little guide to what you’ll find inside so that, for example, if you want to know more about data (including open, big and ‘bad’ data) we tell you to head straight to Chapter 4. In here you’ll also find a bit more on the parts of GIS that really can be baffling if you’re just starting out (like what file formats to use, things like dots per inch, and more about ‘the mighty shapefile’!). 

An example of new Ordnance Survey data we use in the book - this is Manchester

Although we recognise that much of what might be considered core elements of GIS and spatial analysis change little over time, we also recognise that things have changed a lot in the past decade, with new technologies and platforms like QGIS and CARTO helping shape and re-shape an already vibrant discipline. New open data sources have added fuel to the GIS fire and social media has fanned the flames to such an extent that maps are now everywhere, or so it seems. We cover some of this in Chapter 5, where we note that such developments have often led to the creation of what one might charitably describe as ‘bad maps’, and which the book's authors have been guilty of many times! 

But because we’re optimistic people, we do of course focus mainly on the positives, with reference to GIS and cartographic pioneers like Kenneth Field, Anita Graser, Gretchen Peterson, Joshua Stevens and the inspirational Atlas of Design series, where you’ll find some truly breathtaking examples of what can be done with spatial data. We also offer a good bit of advice on how to avoid common pitfalls in your work, so if you’re a student doing GIS and you want to get better grades/marks then we can probably help with that too!

But this an introductory text, and we don’t try to cover everything (far from it) because we thought that would be overwhelming. But we aim to cover the most important things for those working within built environment disciplines more broadly. That’s why the book is peppered with examples of GIS in the real world that people might be able to understand without having to look up a reference book!  Often, we use separate boxes for these, like when we were trying to explain the topic of generalisation in GIS, as you can see below.

Our new book is in part an attempt to bring GIS back to the forefront of planning and built environment disciplines, but also partly an attempt to show how it can help us understand the world just a little bit better, so long as we don’t get carried away with ourselves. We’ll end here with what we say in our concluding remarks in Chapter 9: 

“GIS lets us see. It opens up a world of visualisation that spreadsheet models can never hope to rival. It helps us make links between phenomena on the basis of the attribute that is common to so much of what goes on in our world – the attribute of where.”

We hope you’ll agree and that you’ll find our book useful if you choose to take a closer look - if you want to find out more, head to the book's homepage.