Taste the tube

After my previous post entitled Taste the Rainbow the planets have aligned to give me material for a follow up called Taste the Tube.

The Daily Telegraph recently reported the case of James Wannerton who has synaesthesia and claims to be able to ''taste" all of London Underground's stations differently and distinctly. See also Gizmodo.

Mr Wannerton's condition leads his senses to become muddled so he experiences the sense of taste in relation to what he sees. And this is the map.

At first I was very dismissive of this latest example of what I call "Becksploitation" (the art of using Beck's famous map in a lazy, crude manner to hang your own ideas off and short-cut to high visibility and distribution).  But there's no reason to suspect Mr Wannerton's condition isn't valid and in that sense (no pun intended) this map reflects a very personal geography that he experiences. Soundscapes and smellscapes are often mapped so why not tastescapes.

While it is bizarre, why shouldn't the stations take on a different name that he relates more logically to?  When I regularly used the tube my daily route took me from Roast Lamb, through Raw Carrot, Sausage Meat, Sausage and Fried Egg, Curly Wurly, Apple Pie, Mint Cracknell and Fizzy Water. Odd...because all I used to smell was sweaty armpit, putrid perfume, stale smoker's breath, fast food and urine.

Taste the Rainbow

In much the same way as my pet carto-peeve is non-normalised choropleths, my carto pal Anthony Robinson (@A_C_Robinson)'s is rainbow coloured maps. More specifically, rainbow colour schemes on thematic maps. "Rainbows kill people so stop using them on maps".

Let's not get into that debate but what about maps...

Here's a map from BKLYNR where they've mapped Block by Block, Brooklynn's Past and Present: the construction date of every building in Brooklynn, new York. No mean feat.  Nice bit of data handling and processing.  Then they mapped it using rainbows.

Pretty map...but based on the above, tell me which are the newer and which are the older properties? Actually you can't do that simple analytical task.

The legend helps, of course...but why should blue be old, yellow be turn of the Century and red be new?

This is a perfect example of a colour scheme totally wrecking an otherwise perfectly good map. If the author had used a sequential scheme (say blues, light to dark) then we could have at the very least figured out the relative age of buildings across the map. The only difficulty would have been working out which end of the lightness gradient was new or old. The author states the map can be used to see how development has rippled across a neighbourhood.  Actually, you can't do that. At best you can see which buildings are similarly dated but not how one colour relates to another.

The Ocean Health Index maps suffer the same problem:

Let's not worry too much about what this map shows other than we can recognise that different coastal zones are somehow different.  But that's actually not the case. in fact, when you look at the legend you see that they are different in a numerical sense.  We're not looking at different phenomena. We're looking at areas that are rated on a percentage scale. The deep plum/reds are low on the scale. Light blues are high on the scale. Yellows again occupy the middle area.

Again, a single hue sequential colour scale would work well here. We could instantly see which is relatively higher or lower on the scale.  We wouldn't need to refer to the legend. The map wouldn't require sunglasses.

And what of the different sized buffers? That is simply an artifact of using Web Mercator. They are, in fact, equal distance buffers around the coastline but of course in the north and south they get distorted on Mercator and that simply gives them greater map real estate and visual prominence.

Whether or not rainbows kill people...I'll leave that up to Anthony to comment. They certainly kill maps.

Pretty Maps

There's no doubt that maps that look good are better than maps that look bad and whilst that is, in part, down to subjectivity as technology progresses so we're seeing more better looking maps.

But better looking doesn't mean better mapping. Take for example these maps of people moving around Seattle (actually, a couple of maps). Click on them and go take a look:






They are beautiful (in my opinion).  They have a strong aesthetic that pulls you in to explore. They use colour sparingly and they use a palette that works well. The symbology contrasts well and visually I'd describe them as quite stunning...certainly creative and well composed. As we move through time the individual symbols add a trace to the map so we get a cumulative look at general movement corridors and the blue proportional symbols increase in size as people move close by.  They're grocery stores. The design isn't wholly original but originality shouldn't always bee seen as the cornerstone of something being 'good' anyway (itoWorld's maps of OpenStreetMap edits set the standard for this type of map style and animation some years ago of course). So they look good and follow on from maps designed in a similar fashion. Job done? Unfortunately, beyond the aesthetics are just dumb maps and there's nothing particularly clever about them....they even put the animation to a soundtrack as with many such maps.

The University of Washington's Center for Public Health Nutrition is responsible for them and The Atlantic gives them a short write-ip.  Researchers stuck GPS receivers on 493 people in Seattle to watch where they went across a week in order to see what their food buying patterns were. The maps are a first stab at looking at the data and guess what...people move through space. they move in different ways. Some move faster (cars), some slower (feet) and what do the squiggly lines and symbols tell us...err, nothing... people move from here to there as they go about their daily business.

The GPS wearers did keep a diary of their movements as well as shopping habits etc so it'll be interesting to see if the researchers can turn that data into something more meaningful and actually reveal something and map it.  That's the hard part...turning a research question into a set of digestible findings that can be mapped to reveal them visually.  We wait in anticipation but at the moment the maps are just eye candy. The GPS tracks are in no way broken down into trips to grocery shops...it's just raw data. The blue dots get bigger as people move close to a grocery store located there but that would always happen because grocery stores are located in areas that people move close by. People move. Nothing more or less.


In their second video they tracked speed of movement. The claim is this highlights the walkable parts of the city...but if you look closely it actually doesn't...it just reveals where people who walk...walked. Is downtown walkable...well it will contain more people at certain times of the day who most likely walk to get lunch.  that doesn't mean the urban morphology is any more or less walkable. Correlation does not imply causation.

And here's a second map that's doing the rounds as a collaboration between HERE (Navteq and Nokia Maps) and CartoDB. It's called Living Cities. Go take a look by clicking on the image.

Again...it's visually very appealing and using CartoDB means they've made the UI really slick and modern.  It's certainly pushing web-cartography more towards a higher-quality product and if tools to make web maps begin to provide the ability to design maps like this then that's a really positive move.  The basemap is really nicely integrated into the application for instance and uses some clever symbology. But we're still stuck for purpose....dig a little. What does the map actually show? Again, not very much.  We've got some animated pulses (nothing like visualising the pulse of a city for sure) and factoids popup. There's some clicky things and we have time represented as well.  None of this is particularly useful and hundreds of other city maps also take feeds of data and purport to offer insight into daily patterns.  They don't...they just show partial, generalised and random picto-bites and sound-bites.

This brings me to the general point...should maps always be 'useful'? Well yes...I believe they should but here's the sting: A map's 'use' can be defined purely as an object that is designed simply to look good and bring visual pleasure to a set of data.  There is nothing wrong with stating categorically that your map is designed to just look good.  Maps can just be artistic with pleasure being derived from their appearance or designed to inspire people to design their maps along similar lines.  But...the maps shown here and many, many others go way beyond this simple objective and claim all sorts of nonsense to try and justify their being; to try and purport to show something they have no hope of showing; to raise their standard beyond the purely aesthetic as if they become more valuable by so doing.  But in over-selling their purpose they actually do themselves a disservice. The Seattle maps claim to be about exploring movement, behaviour, grocery shopping and health. The Living Cities maps are designed to tell 'stories'...except they don't, really. They look good...that's about it. They are valuable on that basis alone so let's leave it at that.

Looking good for the sake of looking good is fine by me...and I like what these maps show.  I can look at them, smile, take some ideas and move on....trouble is at the moment it seems people are desperately trying to find a reason to make their own particular pretty map. It's almost as if they are reluctant to simply make a pretty map without having a higher purpose on which to hang their visual ideas. Pretty maps are fine. Pretty maps with a real purpose and which genuinely serve that purpose...now that's the ticket!

Choropleth madness

Hat-tip to @briantimoney for sharing this too-good-to-be-true piece from Business Insider just as I'm about to set off for two weeks of carto-conversation in Germany at the International Cartographic Association conference then the UK at the Society of Cartographer's Summer School and the British Cartographic Societies Symposium. 

MAPS: A Poll Asked America Which States Were The Drunkest, The Hottest And Which Had The Silliest Accent


A poll of 1603 people were asked to answer questions about US States that weren't their own and the responses are amazing....actually, it's not the responses that are amazing, it's the fact that someone thought they could fashion any sort of sense out of the results and then map them into meaningless gross generalisations.

Here's one...

Brilliant...but merely one of 22 maps in the report.  Twenty-two...all apparently giving us an insight into the American psyche

Yes, that's 22 maps based on a sample that represents 0.000005% of the American population. Were they even representative of the population in socio-economic terms? Were they spread evenly across the 52 States (31 people per State) or was the survey stratified so that more populated States had more respondents?  Or was it just a random interweb survey of whomever could be bothered to click through a mundane survey? Were responses based on first-hand knowledge or just stereotypical perceptions?  Bad science all round in relation to the survey.

And the maps...well, each one is beautifully crafted in Web Mercator (not equal area...which of course creates visual problems) and each has a separate colour (really nice design touch). But wait...there's no legends and we are expected to imply that darker hues mean 'more'.  More of what? Totals? yes...yes...they look like totals.  Twenty-two non-normalised choropleths in a single article.  This has to be some sort of record. I can't be certain because there's no details but I would wager serious wonga on these maps all being totals which of course renders them useless when comparing results across a map.

All in all...a sham of a mockery of a sham of a mockery. Bad science. Bad survey. Bad cartography. Bad reporting. And why get so worked up about it?...because only a couple of hours after being published, this piece of utter crap has been viewed nearly 17,000 times, liked on Facebook over 1,000 times, re-tweeted over 200 times etc etc.  Viral choropleth madness! How many of those people have looked at the maps and seen that the distributions are based on a poorly framed survey and because they're not normalised they mean nothing?  I bet it's something like 0.000005% of them (oh, that's less than 1 person...but near enough I guess) 

UPDATE: About 24hrs after going live the post had got over 300,000 views, 30,000 Facebook likes, 1700 tweets etc. A week later...690,000 page views. Nice visibility for poor maps!

UPDATE 2: The author, Walter Hickey has contacted me with details of the survey.  It was stratified so at least there is some sense to the distribution of respondents by State.  I'd still claim (or whine as someone mentioned below) that 1400 people is not a particularly good sample. I had to do 1500 surveys for my PhD in a town with a population of 210,000 to get a statistically significant sample.  Not sure how 1400 in a population of 310,000,000 can in any way be representative.  Regardless, the maps are still wrong so it's a moot point.