Why I stopped worrying and learnt to love local geography.

I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity recently to talk with friends at Bath:Hacked about local geographies. This was in part to advertise the upcoming Boundary Review of the area, but also a chance to reflect on the many ways we slice and dice the local authority area.

This was something of a semi-structured ramble through geographies against the ONS’ rather wonderful hierarchical representation of  statistical geographies.

In practice, particularly when thinking about any locality, its geography is intertwined with its history, its natural and ecological setting, its psychogeography (if you’re into such things) and so forth. But those caveats notwithstanding, it was a fun exercise.

Download the slides here.

 

 

 

 

Top 20 Datasets for UK Local Government.

I thought

was an interesting thought piece. Could we even identify them, let alone publish them? Here follows a very quick rapid reflection on it…

Continue reading “Top 20 Datasets for UK Local Government.”

We need to talk about (the small-area) Brexit (voting data)

The BBC recently published a piece on small area referendum voting data. The information was gathered, through Freedom of Information requests, from less than half the local authorities (acting as ‘designated counting areas’) who administered the referendum. It’s a rather problematic piece of work.

This analysis is riddled with errors; there could be evidence of illegal practice; there are clear opportunities to improve practice around election data and the implications of this release have relevance to other realms of government data.

Continue reading “We need to talk about (the small-area) Brexit (voting data)”