On a sunny Friday at the end of half term, Nick attended the TEDx Truro event, ‘Beyond Barriers’ running at Truro and Penwith College. TEDx events are the ‘little brothers’ of the main TED events, the world famous series of short videos given in the area of Technology, Education and Design under the banner ‘Ideas worth spreading’.

TEDx events are independently organised and the Truro event is in its second year, with a sell-out crowd of 250 attendees. This years talks covered a really wide range of topics, covering everything from dyslexia, gender dysphoria, mental health, sex work, to biochemistry, depression, robots and artificial intelligence.

There was an amazing buzz in the auditorium, this continued during the breaks; there was idea sharing, discussions and even a selfie with some local celebrities! It was a great networking opportunity, meeting people from Software Cornwall, Pirate FM, Plymouth University and a whole host of local SMEs.

The talks around the area of mental health particularly resonated, with both Will Coleman (from Golden Tree Productions, famous for being the driving force behind The Man Engine) and Emma Wright (working for a national cancer charity in Cornwall) talking about how they had often presented one face to the world at large, but at times had another that truly reflected their feelings and experiences, which very few people saw. Many other speakers also discussed mental health in passing, and it is vital for mental health to be discussed more openly and easily than it is at the moment.

TEDx was organised by a great group of volunteers, so many thanks to them for organising everything and making it run smoothly. They are already planning for next year – head over to http://tedxtruro.com to find out what it’s all about, and we hope to see you there next year!

Cross-posted at http://www.clearmapping.co.uk/our-blog/item/492-tedx-truro-beyond-barriers.html

Cartograms are a great way of representing data that refers to people, and it allows you to give urban areas (which generally cover relative small areas) much more prominence than rural areas (which usually cover very large areas). The image below shows the usual geographic representation of the output areas, alongside the cartogram version. Note how the rural cluster (representing about 13% of the population) is very dominant in the ‘standard’ representation, but much less so in the cartogram representation.

For my presentation at GISRUK2015 on TravelOAC (travel geodemographics) I was presenting a series of cluster data by 2011 Census output areas. Output areas are based around a standard population, with the result that many rural output areas are geographically large and many urban output areas are geographically small. When considering the classification data, it makes sense to give each output area equal consideration, so I decided to create a cartogram of the output area boundaries, based on the usual resident population.

I used a piece of software called ScapeToad which is a quick and easy way to create a cartogram from a custom data set. They have a good set of instructions on their website and the processing of all OAs in England and Wales (181,408 areas, 79mb shapefile) only took 49 seconds.

I was inspired by the cartograms used on the ONS Census Interactive website showing a range of variables. There are a number of ways of generating cartograms, and the ONS team used an approach based on http://lambert.nico.free.fr/tp/biblio/Dougeniketal1985.pdf where the browser does a lot of the heavy lifting. There is also an ArcScript available for ArcGIS at http://arcscripts.esri.com/details.asp?dbid=15638 which I used a few years ago and worked well then, but I’m not sure if it still does now!

P.S. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to see Chris’s presentation on cartogram methods (http://leeds.gisruk.org/abstracts/GISRUK2015_submission_83.pdf) as it was on at the same time as I was presenting!