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.

Research with QGIS, R and speaking to people

I recently led a piece of research for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on disconnected neighbourhoods - basically, it looked at the UK's most deprived areas and how connected or disconnected they are to their wider cities in relation to jobs and housing. You can read the brief Findings or Full Report here. This post is just about the methods we used and some of the outputs. We used open source software QGIS and R for the analysis (led by Ruth Hamilton) and we also spoke to policymakers across the country (Rich Crisp and Ryan Powell).

You can see the full report here

We looked at those areas in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales that fell within the 20% most deprived on the national deprivation indices in each nation and then explored data relating to household moves and commuting (plus lots more). We updated and developed two area typologies to help us make sense of the data - and to see how things changed we produced riverplots (Sankey diagrams) in R (this was done by the briliant Ruth Hamilton).

Created with the Riverplot package in R

I also did a little bit myself with open source software, including updating a 'divided cities' type graphic I produced in the past - looking at the spatial split between most and least deprived parts of 13 cities across the UK, as you can see below. See Sheffield in particular for a very stark divide.

Red = most deprived, blue = least deprived

Our colleagues Rich Crisp and Ryan Powell then spoke with more than 140 policymakers in cities across the UK - another nice 'open source' method. You can read more about this in Chapter 6 of the report but the bottom line is that if we want things to change for the better then we need to take a different approach to urban policy - a more inclusive approach.

As I said, there are two typologies, and we then combined these into a matrix in an attempt to understand area types a bit better and then suggest possible policy responses that might make sense. What each category means is explained in the report but in the figure below you can probably make sense of what 'Gentrifier' areas are and what those labelled 'Disconnected' are.

The shaded areas might be a good policy focus to begin with

The point of this blog post, however, was just to highlight how useful and effective open source software now is, and can be, in real-world research. Advocates will already know this but many more have yet to make the leap so hopefully this will provide just a little bit of inspiration or motivation to do so.

We produced hundreds of maps for the project (too many for the report) so you can probably find one for your area in the online folders. Two examples - one for each typology - are shown below.

Residential typology map of Birmingham

Travel to work typology map for Glasgow

For more on the methods used to develop the typology, see the Annexes in the Full report.

International collaboration, without leaving the house (or, why social media can be a good thing)

The idea behind today's post is in some ways blindingly obvious, but also often overlooked. Basically, it's that sharing ideas online can lead to all sorts of interesting, unexpected international collaborations of various types. I'm talking here specifically about research and academic-related collaboration, but it could apply to just about anything. I thought I'd share a short maps/viz story about this, just to demonstrate that 'internationalisation' (a common feature of University policy) doesn't mean having to cram yourself into a plane for 10 hours to some far flung paradise. But of course I should start with a map.

It's a bit of an eyesore in some ways, but that's not the point. Here's the story, and the point...

I'd been doing some work on mapping travel to work flows, since the data were released for England and Wales in the summer of 2014. Some time after that, another University of Sheffield department were contacted by a scholar from Turkey (Ebru Sener) asking about the possibility of visiting on a short Erasmus-funded trip. The other department didn't follow up so I looked into it, Skyped with Ebru and quickly discovered we had a lot of common interests and a good amount of overlap in our skills - but also, crucially, areas where we could learn from each other.

This led to a research visit in 2015, during which time we wrote a paper on housing market search (now published in Cities). Ebru also taught a class for me that week, which was great. We then kept in touch via e-mail and social media and it was Ebru that suggested I make the commuter dots go back to where they came from, which I thought was a nice touch and I then wrote this stuff up into a short piece for the Huffington Post after they got in touch (I have a paper on that coming out in future as well).

That summer, I experimented further on this area of research by looking at US commuting flows at the small area level. I published a short working paper on it, as well as a couple of blog pieces, plus the data I created from it. This then led to a brilliant US scholar (Garrett Nelson) taking a sub-set of the data and using a community partitioning algorithm to derive communities for one state (Massachusetts - see below). He blogged this, told me about it on Twitter and then I had a new idea so contact him again to see if he wanted to collaborate on a project to do this for the whole United States. Once again, we Skyped, made a plan and then got to work (side note: we used cloud computing because the data had outgrown the desktop environment).

Now we've almost finished our paper and - we hope - this will lead to further collaboration on the topic.

Following this, the brilliant Mark Evans (from Michigan) got in touch to say he was planning something which built on some of the ideas I'd had in order to build an interactive US version of the animated dot map you see above. He built it, shared with me and then it went kind of viral - with many news sites and local and regional outlets picking it up (Daily Mail, CityLab, WIRED, Boston.com etc.). I don't claim that I could have done this but it's nice to know I was, in part, a source of inspiration. Mark has also shared his method, which is great for further collaboration and other users. In the gif below you can see that Mark has coloured the dots based on where people come from, which is a nice innovation.

And the point? International collaboration and internationalisation seem to be talked about a lot in terms of travel, short and medium-term study visits and can be a logistical nightmare. Often, it's necessary though. The kind of thing I've discussed above can be an additional means of 'internationalisation' that is both cost effective and time efficient. I haven't seen that much about the possibilities for formal international collaboration through social media. This might be because I don't pay attention. 

Having said that you can do international collaboration without leaving the house, I am of course off to the US this week for a conference...