Well, you will have to click through to the article for that data visualisation. But, I will provide you with the choropleth map of national identities. That is, how English do citizens in English authorities consider themselves? Scottish in Scotland? Welsh in Wales?
Credit for the piece goes to Mark Easton.
Recently my hobby of my family’s history has focused on my Rusyn (or Ruthenian) roots. However, this recent work out of Stanford University piques my interest in my English heritage, even though much of it is very far back in time. Using my 23 × great-grandfather Reynold de Mohun you can begin to see how it links persons within families, how those lives intersected over time, and the geographical areas where that person lived. In Reynold’s case, it was the 12th–13th centuries in Somerset, England.
But as the title kindred implies, this piece is not just about direct family connections, but also the marriages and close cultural links between certainly the elite of British society. Below is how Reynold is connected to King William I, better known as William the Conqueror.
Family history or genealogy is a topic ripe for data visualisation and information design because it is all about connections. But I have found beyond the common family tree diagram little interesting has been created. This work is a solid start in the right direction.
Credit for the piece goes to Nicholas Jenkins, Elijah Meeks, and Scott Murray.
So apparently a baby was born in London…as was another who is likely to become the future King of the Great Britain and Northern Ireland (not of England). But the British love their queues and so this infant will have to wait in line just like everyone else (in the royal line of succession). The Economist visualised just how long these waits have been for English and British monarch vis-a-vis their time spent on the throne.
Credit for the piece goes to R.L.W. and G.D.
The United Kingdom is one of eight, probably nine nuclear powers. (Israel has never confirmed that it has tested/operates nuclear weapons.) Unlike most countries, the UK only uses one delivery system to operate its weapons: submarines using Trident ballistic missiles.
The British Trident system became an issue in the coalition government. While it was supported by both the previous Labour government and the Conservatives, the programme had to be reviewed per the coalition agreement. The review has been completed and it will be made public. But to explain to the public how Trident works, the BBC created this graphic. It does a really good job of showing the reach of the British submarines from one location, but then showing why an adequate replacement would need at least three to four submarines.
Credit for the Trident graphic goes to the BBC. The table is my own work.
Census data fascinates me from a data visualisation perspective; one can look at it so many different ways. Last week I looked at some of the Slovakian census data on the Carpatho-Rusyns that live in the northeastern mountains of Slovakia. But yesterday, the British Office of National Statistics released the results from their census of England and Wales (Scotland reports later and Northern Ireland did so already, yay devolution.) One of the big news stories was that England and Wales had 500,000 more people than had been expected. That doesn’t sound like a lot of people, but to put it roughly into American proportions, that would be like finding that there was a whole new city the size of Chicago somewhere in the United States.
But while many organisations and individuals will certainly be looking at the census data in the coming days, weeks, and months, the ONS released its own interactive application. Basically it looks at the population pyramid for England and Wales from 1911 to 2011, a century’s worth of data. But what makes this different from the GE population pyramids, for example, is the context that the ONS has added that strict data pulls lack.
Here in 1921, rolling over a particular cohort reveals the details of those aged 30 in 1921. There is a clear difference between the number of men and women. But why? The text block’s first note details how 700,000 men aged 20–40 died during World War I and thus altered the basic structure of the English and Welsh population.
And in 1951 we begin to look at the British baby boom in the post-war era. Again, while the Baby Boom might be expected, the ONS also points out that the NHS, the British National Health Service, had also recently started and was positively affecting life expectancy and the general health of the British public. These are again things that would not likely appear in more data-focused pieces.
But everybody loves to compare things to other things. So, the ONS also released a more data-focused application that allows the user to select two different census geographies and compare them. This is more as one would expect, comparing overlays vs. side-by-side looks at different population pyramids. The example below compares London to Birmingham.
Credit for the pieces go to the ONS Visualisation Centre.
For the Queen’s Jubilee I had been looking for a good infographic or two about how the United Kingdom had changed over the length of her reign, at least thus far. Alas, I found not a great deal of substantial work. This is an infographic from the Guardian that looks at quite a few single figures.
But it also has a map looking at the decline/unravelling of the British Empire.
God Save the Queen.
