Table of Contents

Wiley Series in Computational and Quantitative Social Science

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This edition first published 2012

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dorling, Daniel.

The visualization of spatial social structure / Daniel Dorling.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-119-96293-9 (cloth)

1. Human geography--Great Britain. 2. Cartography--Methodology. 3. Cartography--Philosophy. I. Title.

GF551.D674 2005

304.2072'8–dc23

To Benjamin Dorling (1971–1989)

List of figures

List of text boxes

Preface

This book tells a story about seeing things differently. The story is a way of introducing the reader to new ways of thinking about how to look at social statistics, particularly those about people in places.

The visualization of spatial social structure means, literally, trying to make visible the geographical patterns to the way our lives have come to be socially organised, seeing the geography in society. To a statistical readership visualization implies using data. More widely defined it implies freeing our imaginations.

The story of this book centres on a particular place and time, 1980s Britain, and a particular set of records, routine social statistics. A great deal of information about the 1980s social geography of Britain is contained within databases such as the population censuses, surveys and administrative data. During the 1980s computer graphics developed and, to comprehend the information they held, a few social scientists thought it needed to be effectively visualized with computer graphics ().

In the 1980s ward data might be put on a grid of small squares as shown here. Each ward is coloured by the proportions of people born in each of the three main countries of Britain, but who are now living in that ward. The mixing of colours suggests the outcome of lifetime migration patterns. However, the map is misleading, overemphasising mixing in remoter rural areas.

In the United States a small but significant number of geographers in the 1960s argued that conventional maps contained a massive and unwanted distortion, but a growing number in the social sciences back in the 1970s then thought that anything numerical was in some way suspicious and could de-humanise inquiry. This work builds on listening to the latter, but also on developing the techniques of the former group, which have been largely ignored in the 1990s and the 2000s.

Mapping, by the late 1980s, had been rejected by many social analysts as an unsuitable means of showing spatial social structure. The usual alternative was, and remains, to write in the abstract on social structure and rarely to employ graphics or maps or to rely on numbers. However, that wastes a huge amount of information and the skills of many more numerically minded people who might also be interested in uncovering the social organisation of the world they live in.

A human cartography is proposed here that reveals, through amalgamating and subdividing the events of people's lives, the shape of society (). The aim here is to see the whole, in as much detail as possible, at a glance. While the case study is 1980s Britain, the geography of Thatcherism, the applicability of these techniques is hopefully far wider. The areas studied could be far smaller than an island like Britain, or larger. Revealed here is the society inherited by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1979 and how that society had been changed by 1990, the year of her forced resignation.

This population cartogram shows the mix of people by birthplace in 129 211 small areas of similar population size. All are visible. On the previous map even most wards are invisible. Here it is clear that neighbourhoods were not mixed in much of urban Scotland and Wales. Areas coloured white—where more people are born overseas—can now be seen.

These same techniques could be applied to visualize a state like California from when it was dreaming in 1965 to when it was potentially bankrupt in 2012. The more human focused forms of cartography proposed here include new ways of looking at the geography and social statistics of places as large as India, as remote as Anchorage or even as tiny as number 29 Acacia Avenue.

The illustrations included here are what is core to this work. They include pictures of the distribution of age, sex, birthplace and occupation across Britain in 1981, changes in these from 1971, unemployment and house price dynamics throughout the 1980s boom and 1989 bust, general election results from 1955 to 1987 (followed by all local election voting from 1987 to 1990), visual summaries of migration flows from one part of the country to another and drawings of thousands of daily commuting streams ().

Each line represents a minimal number of moves made between wards in England and Wales in one year on a conventional land area map. The interward migration patterns show a complete tangle of lines. The Isle of Wight can be made out, as can the outlines of some towns and cities, but in general areas towards the centre of England simply become mostly criss-crossed.

The creation of simple computer generated cartograms is explained, where each spatial unit (up to one hundred thousand to a page) is drawn with its area proportional to the number of people who live there. Colour and complex symbols are used to study several factors simultaneously upon these cartogram bases, to let the analyst compare different datasets at the same time, for what they show about the same places.

Novel visually effective means of showing millions of flows and other changes over time are also developed (). Further advances are imagined and travel time surfaces are described, through which tunnels are cut and over which other information can be draped. A case study of the distribution of childhood leukaemia in space and time is undertaken, showing a pattern of no pattern (). The detailed results of the ten general elections up to Margaret Thatcher's last victory, of 1987, are compared. Revealing images of the beginnings of how Britain came to be set on the path to growing polarisation is a theme that runs throughout.

On the cartogram the bundles of migratory flows take the shape of London boroughs and other areas from which council house tenants have found it difficult to move in the past. The more prosperous areas of the country are blackened by the density of flows in and through them. The shape of the conurbations is clear, as people who can avoid living there migrate around them.

These eight frames are taken from an animation of the changing concentration of cases of childhood leukaemia (where time is the moving third dimension). They define a volume within which rates are estimated and smoothed. Although it appears there is clustering, the methods used tend to find the areas of highest population density when the base is a land area map. Note: parts of original image were produced as a bit-map of pixels of colour not as a vector graphics file of lines, curves and areas.

Essentially, however, this is a book about graphical techniques, not about social history, epidemiological analysis or political study. Twenty years ago almost no visualization software existed. To draw a map required writing a computer program. This meant you could draw a map in many different ways. Today software has become sufficiently versatile that, without needing to program, it might again be possible to produce the kind of images you might want to produce, rather than those you might get from the default options.

This book is about a spatial way of thinking of the structure of society—of social structure—and how you might draw what it is you are thinking of, if you think of it in a particular way. Although it uses examples from the past, the focus here is on technique, not subject. However, the particular past is of great interest to some (including this author who cannot resist making asides as a result). Prior to 2011, the 1980s were the last time Britain faced mass unemployment, rapidly growing social divisions or widespread rioting.

This text describes the rationale for, and development of, a new way of visualizing information in geographical research (). Through the pictures the methods are illustrated and mistakes, techniques and discoveries shown. From the footnotes, which are largely quotations from a disparate literature, the origins of many of the ideas can be found. Time and again it was the suggestions of others to move in these directions.

These eight frames are taken from an animation of the changing concentration of cases of childhood leukaemia over equal population sized areas defining life volumes within which rates are estimated and smoothed. Although it still appears there is clustering the methods used would draw apparent but forever moving concentrations, even from randomly generated data.

Through technical asides some of the practical realities of the work are described. Through the illustrations and their captions, a picture of what had been happening to Britain in those recession years unfolds. Many of the pictures could justify an extended discussion, but the commentary is kept brief. Little detail is included about the computer software written and used here because much of that is dependent on the novel (but inexpensive) Acorn hardware configuration and progress is so rapid that such knowledge is of only transient value.

The images in this book reveal how in aggregate people get to work and the structure of the towns and cities in which they live is examined. Migration (moving home) is studied here in several ways. The changing patterns of migration from birthplaces are shown and the streams of movement that cut across the country are drawn in unprecedented, and as yet not superseded, detail.

House price change is visualized across several years and thousands of places. This detail reveals that the origins of the 1989 crash lay years earlier in the heart of the London housing market. Other new techniques are developed to show the structure of local housing markets. Through different methods again, the changes in this country's industrial structure are seen as they have affected people in actual communities.

shows a simplified version of a more complex chart of industrial change in which just eight industrial groups are shown, but also how those groups of employment altered for men and women, and for full- and part-time workers separately in 1981, 1984, 1987 and between each consequent pair of survey years.

In the 1980s it was common to aggregate banking and finance with the communication and transport industries as these were all seen as facilitating other work, not as profit-making centres in their own right. Note how so many more jobs were lost in the first period of the 1980s, 1981–1984, as compared to the second period, 1984–1987.

This single small collection of five glyphs suggests that male full-time manufacturing job losses in the early 1980s were not quite replaced by female full- and part-time work, mostly in service industries, mostly later on in the 1980s. A lot can be shown in just a few simple images.

The spatial and social manoeuvring of political allegiances is viewed from several angles over the same period and the relationships discussed. Finally, a smaller scale of analysis is considered, looking at what many images can tell us about the distribution of a disease, viewed from many different directions in space and time.

These social and political subjects are not each arranged in their own, individual chapters, but run through the book, as it is a book about new possible methods of visualization rather than the visualization of subjects. The rationale for using images to study people, places and spaces is discussed as the new images are introduced.

The central part of the book looks at what appears to be a honeycomb structure formed by a particular method of viewing the spatial patterns of society at single points in time and how that image alters through transforming the envisioned mosaic. The cobweb of flows that is responsible for most of the changes and stability is then drawn.

The last part of this book attempts to show more complex aspects on the surface of social landscapes. Sculptured symbols allow us to see the relationships between the wood and the trees of social structure (). Finally, a three-dimensional volume visualization of geographical and historical social structure, of spacetime, is attempted. The book concludes by describing how all these methods and insights can, when brought together, create a new statistical view of human geography and recent history.

In these glyphs, the housing market is divided into a number of branches, the branches join to show bigger sectors and the trunk represents the whole housing market. The shape of the resultant trees shows the housing market structure. Here the national shapes are shown. Inflation causes the length of a branch to increase and fewer sales in a sector cause the branch to become thinner.

Visualization in the social sciences demands that we consider what is happening in many places at the same time. We do not need to study aspects of the world out of context. Here, an attempt is made to cover much ground and show numerous relationships. To do this it is necessary to be brief in detail and to be broad in scope, so the pictures often have to speak for themselves. Only once you have seen what it is you want to talk about can you then better ask questions and make interpretations.

 The work of one was recently republished (Bunge, 2011).

 This is a lack of clustering later confirmed in numerous studies with access to many more years of data. In May 2011 ‘… there is no evidence to support the view that there is an increased risk of childhood leukaemia and other cancers in the vicinity of NPPs (Nuclear Power Plants) in Great Britain’ (Elliott, 2011, p. 102).

 An Acorn Archimedes computer was used, produced by the company known as the ‘British Apple’, which existed for twenty years from 1978 to 1998. See the endnote to this book for more details.

 ‘The analytic power to order data has potential equally for control or liberation. It is all a matter of questions asked and interpretations made’ (Taylor, 1991, p. 30).

Introduction: Human cartography

Images are only images. But if they are numerous, repeated, identical, they cannot all be wrong. They show us that in a varied universe, forms and performances can be similar: there are towns, routes, states, patterns … which in spite of everything resemble each other.

(Braudel, 1979, p. 133)

This book presents the thesis that light can be cast on the study of society through the visualization of social structure. The antecedents of the work presented here lie most firmly in human geography and cartography while being influenced by writings in other disciplines. There are contributions from studies in computer and statistical graphics, graphic design and art, mathematical abstraction () and political science.

Convergence of z: = z² + c on the complex plane. The Mandelbrot set exhibits infinite variations on the same visual theme. Every picture is familiar, but all are subtly different. As you magnify the image, the detail and variation is as great at every level. In human geography the same degree of diversity can often be recognised on a local scale, as can be seen nationally.

Particular views on the study of history, geography and sociology guide much of the writing. Above all, this book is concerned with designing and advocating new ways of seeing the social world we live in. Before doing that, it is necessary to explain why still widely accepted graphical techniques are being discarded by the visual methodology proposed here. Most important of all, in order to show the spatial structure of society the conventional use of maps of physical geography has to be rejected.

Maps were designed to explore new territories and fight over old ones. They show where oceans lie and rivers run. Their projections are calculated to aid navigation by compass or depict the quantity of land under crops (). They are a flat representation of part of the surface of the globe; they show things that often cannot be seen. How then can we see social structure, in the same manner as the map opens up land to the eye? How can we begin to see the patterns of society, which we know are there since we help form them, but patterns that we may have never literally viewed?

The image is centred on the land-use pattern of the North East of England. Tyneside, Wearside and Carlisle can be distinguished, as can the pattern of farmland and other landscapes. Just over thirty years ago this was some of the most high resolution data available (from researchers at Merlewood). Population was also mapped by grid-square in the late 1970s.

Maps were not designed to show the spatial distributions of people, although the single spatial distribution of people upon the surface of the globe at one instance in time can be shown on them. They cannot illustrate the simplest human geography of population. People are but points on the conventional map, clustered into collections of points called homes, into groups of points known as villages or cities. Communities of people are not like fields of crops. The paths through space that they follow are not long wide rivers of water and yet, to see anything on maps of people, they must be shown as such.

Conventional maps cannot show how many people live in small areas; instead they show how little land supports so many people. They cannot show who the people are, what they do, where they go. They show no temporal distribution, they do not need to—how quickly do rivers move or mountains shrink on a human timescale? They will not be an appropriate base to show the distributions of people changing—international migration, moving house or just people going to work ().

It might be thought that reducing the amount of information shown on a migration map could clarify the picture, but here an image is drawn suggesting that is not the case. When just the largest flows are included these mostly tend to be between neighbouring wards that share a particularly wiggly boundary and/or where the wards have larger populations.

The aim here is to make sense of the reality of thousands of people simultaneously threading their way through life. What are they doing and why are they doing it? How can we see into every home, know what everyone does? We can't, but we can guess and we have some clues. We can guess from what, introspectively, we know from being part of society. We amass clues when people are counted.

There has been an obsession for counting people since recording became possible. Every ten years, in many countries, hundreds of thousands of people count people (in the census). Increasingly our actions are being recorded; we are now each noted several times a day, from the heat we register on satellite images to almost every transaction and phone call we make or unit of electricity we consume.

The conventional statistical treatment of numerical information about people averages them, agglomerates them and destroys the detail that is of interest, taking a million numbers and returning just half a dozen. These techniques were conceived when little better could be done. Now it is possible to show you a million bits of information at a glance that would be challenging to describe in a thousand words ().

Votes for the Northern half of the 705 parliamentary constituencies. These are the key frames to a video animation of the change in voting over ten elections. The basic shape of allegiances in the North can be seen to have remained much the same over the period. The most dramatic change is in Northern Ireland's exit from the main political arena.

Pictures can make ideas plausible, the screen beautiful, millions of numbers meaningful. They have intrigued many, as maps and charts of rivers and mountains. Here traditional maps are the inspiration, but not the foundation, for the creation of new graphics to form pictures of people, with their rivers of roads down which they flow and mountains of cities up which they climb.

How millions of human beings cooperate, compete and coordinate can be very hard to grasp, let alone understand how they then interact with other objects, species and resources. Our minds are the most powerful tools we have to address these problems. The difficulty comes in trying to address these problems to our minds.

From 1975 to 1989 orthodox cartographic methodology was translated on to the computer screen. The subject of cartography was subsumed by the study of geographic information systems, but the fundamental basis to cartography, physical geography, has remained. Thematic maps drastically distort the reality they purport to contain, at worst reversing the patterns that exist.

People who study people, who are interested in societies, politics, history, economics and increasingly even those interested in human geography, do not often use maps or other graphics. A topographic map base allows, at most, the depiction of human land use. People have created maps based on human geography in the past, but only with the advent of sophisticated computer graphics, visualization, has it become possible to do this on an easily replicable basis.

Most important is addressing the problem of how time and space can be transformed to represent clearly the patterns within them, on paper or in animation. Transformation is inherent in representation (). That is a most difficult concept to accept. It inevitably affects the images produced and the emphasis the viewer places on different places and, more importantly, the relationship between places and times—the metric. The argument for transforming has been made repeatedly over many decades, but usually by mavericks who have been mostly ignored. For instance, in 1966 Bill Bunge wrote:

In the South of the country we see the most dramatic changes in people's voting patterns. From a fairly mixed first image in the 1950s, a divided nation had developed by 1987. The darkening ring of greeny-blue (Liberal and Conservative) constituencies around the Capital is clear, as is the geography of its evolution. The boundaries of the major conurbations are shown by faint lines.

Consider the use of rivers on base maps. With the invention of bridges to cross them and railroads to compete with transportation on them, it could be argued that rivers have become unimportant enough to be eliminated from the map. They might be replaced by major railroad lines. … Major cities are more important ‘islands’ for many purposes than the atolls of the Pacific. It is probably true that of all the degrees of latitude and longitude shown on the map, only the equator and the poles are on the mental map and, therefore, the other degrees might be dropped as superfluous. … It is much easier to plot the continental outlines, rivers and mountain peaks than to obtain a census of population or an accurate map of arable land.

(Bunge, 1966, pp. 45–46)

William Bunge has recently been rediscovered, and is now presented as being one of the most pioneering social scientists of the 1960s. Many of his ignored claims are reiterated in stronger terms here. They call for new images, most especially cartograms.

Put simply, on a cartogram people no longer exist on paper as points, but as areas, so they can now be legitimately drawn (when grouped) as fields (); their paths of aggregate movement appear now as rivers perhaps running through a landscape of accessibility covered with the vegetation of some aspect of social structure.

The different coloured areas here represent some 250 counties and major cities (with populations over 50 000), which have been resized and reshaped in proportion to their 1981 census populations, keeping the rough shape of the coastline and the length of internal boundaries to a minimum. This continuous area cartogram was created on a 32K BBC microcomputer.

In many countries the clues to social structure given by official administrative sources and in survey sources consist mostly of the absolute numbers, such as the age and sex of people across the country. Then, every ten years the combinations of their answers to a few questions at the census are provided—where they were born, what job they do or did, where they did it, where they moved. Here only British data are used as a case study to illustrate how much possible visualization there is, even of one small island.

There are many noncensus forms of information that can be drawn on (). One claim of visualization is the ability to handle large quantities of loosely related data coherently. Some other sources and surveys are called upon here, but all from a particular era. Although this work was first drafted between 1989 and 1991, it has been extensively redrafted given the hindsight of twenty years. Much of the text is new, but all the examples are taken from then or before to constrict the case study in time as well as space.

In 1987 the Liberal Party had merged with the (ex-Labour) breakaway Social Democrat Party to form what was called the ‘Alliance’. It won relatively few seats; seats are represented by all those hexagons shown in the top internal diamond of this electoral triangle, each coloured by the voting mix within the seat. Labour wins are bottom left. Conservative victories are bottom right.

Alternative sources to the routine administrative data used in these pages include how people voted in the local and national elections of the decades being studied (), national surveys of workplaces that were conducted in several years in the 1980s in Britain, the health service records of internal migration, building societies' lists of house sales and information on the infrastructure of roads, railways and settlements. These were digitally available in the 1980s. What is shown here is the means of putting these numbers together, as a collection of images forming one picture of one place during a short, dozen years or so, period of time.

On the electoral triangle each constituency is positioned by its three-way share of the vote. An arrow can be drawn to where that share moved to, coloured by the mix of votes at that political destination. The lower triangle, by combining two elections, shows most clearly how the country divided, the left-most arrows pointing leftwards, the right pointing right and up.

The simplest of spatial distributions to envisage are those captured at single instances of time, and so it is with these that this book begins. Later chapters show that it is possible to visualize the changes in the population over time in tens of thousands of streets within a single picture. Much of what this shows about Britain will be unexpected even though it is not new information that is being used here and even though there has been much time for other ways of study to uncover what is shown here.

The methods employed here should hopefully encourage others to develop abstract imaging further. The ways people move about, day to day and year to year, is visualized in this book as streams flowing through space. Towards the end of the book are revealed images to depict the little that is known about large numbers of people, which are totally different from anything that would be recognised in current practice. A notional surface is proposed where the distance between points is made equal to how long it would take humans to travel between them, upon which we can then drape other distributions.

If enough researchers are inspired to experiment with the kinds of techniques shown here it may soon become possible to create true spacetime volumes of pattern and colour to depict the entire evolution of a single phenomenon, for example unemployment at every place, every month (). The alternative is to cut through this distribution, collapsing all of space to one point, to draw graphs of change over time.

This is an image of all the publically available information at that time of unemployment rates, shown relative to the national average rate for each year. The sparkling picture shows the great variation from place to place with their relatively good and bad years, but cannot show the overall trend at the same time. A place that always bucked the trend would not stand out, which is most odd.

Presented here is a methodology for studying relatively data-rich spatiotemporal distributions and their interrelations that is at odds with conventional approaches. The alternative starting point of this work is to ask how you amalgamate individuals rather than subdivide society.

A logical unit of analysis does exist for the study of spacetime in human geography—it is a human life. As yet we have very little easily accessed information on individual people. However, of the whole of the population of Britain at least, census data are given at a resolution whereby, for national pictures, what is produced here using over 120 000 pixels would appear little different from pictures drawn with the benefit of such information—images using some 60 000 000 pixels, one pixel per person on a printed page. The images shown here are a little like those seen when everyone in a packed football stand holds a coloured card above their head to form part of a giant picture. The image can still appear as the full picture would, but somewhat blurred. Giving everyone a card of the same size does not distort the image.

Social science does need maps, but the maps that are currently drawn in its name, apart from often being bad examples of physical geography's cartography, are often bad social science. They make concentrations appear where they are not and dissolve existing patterns. They rarely portray anything but the most simple of spatial distributions, certainly not spacetime social evolution or the interrelation of a dozen different influences.

In this book some suggestions for new forms of visualization are given. When these images were first drawn, access to computers and to the software needed were far too restricted for there to be much chance of wider adoption. The images included here are only now being properly printed for the first time, despite having been drawn two decades ago.

In reproducing previously unseen old images in an updated context and with a revised text, it is hoped that through the subjects covered an alternative picture of Britain's recent past will develop in the reader's imagination. In this way the value of drawing images showing how everyone's lives are together arranged may become more apparent, not through these words and this writer's declarations, but simply through what you can begin to see by beginning to visualize the spatial social structure of Britain.

 See Muehrcke (1978, 1981), Szegö (1984, 1987), Anderson (1988) and Cuff (1989).