The annual Asia Power Index — launched by the Lowy Institute in 2018 — measures resources and influence to rank the relative power of states in Asia. The project evaluates international power in Asia through 128 indicators across eight thematic measures: military capability and defence networks, economic capability and relationships, diplomatic and cultural influence, as well as resilience and future resources.
The Index ranks 26 countries and territories in terms of their capacity to shape their external environment — its scope reaching as far west as Pakistan, as far north as Russia, and as far into the Pacific as Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
The project allows to choose different types of visualizations, and one of the most interesting among them is the network visualization that shows how countries are connected through their economic, cultural, defence and diplomatic ties.
The IPCC has recently published their sixth assessment report on the physical evidence of climate change. The report has again confirmed evidence of climate change across all global regions, which will affect rainfall patterns, sea levels, exposure to extreme heat events. To better understand the impact of these changes across regions, the Working Group I has produced an interactive Atlas that allows to visualize the geographical impact of different climate change scenarios. Climate change is here, and it is crucial to comprehend its varying geographical impact, so this is a very welcome tool to help researchers and policy makers in this task.
Edited by Zachary P. Neal, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, US and Céline Rozenblat, Professor of Urban Geography, Faculty of Geosciences and Environment,Université de Lausanne, Switzerland
‘If you want to understand cities – the innovation and dynamism they generate and the way they sort and segregate people by class, race and other dimensions – you have to start by understanding that cities are networks. Zachary Neal and Céline Rozenblat have done all of us who care about cities a great service by pulling together the very best and brightest thinkers on cities and networks in this terrific volume.’ – Richard Florida, University of Toronto, US and author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis
This Handbook of Cities and Networks provides a cutting-edge overview of research on how economic, social and transportation networks affect processes both in and between cities. Exploring the ways in which cities connect and intertwine, it offers a varied set of collaborations, highlighting different theoretical, historical and methodological perspectives.
International contributions assess the state of the field of network analysis, presenting interdisciplinary insights that draw on theory from geography, economics, sociology, history, archaeology and psychology, and outlining methodological tools that include ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative approaches. Illustrating a framework for integrating the diversity of urban networks, the Handbook demonstrates that by exploring urban networks with different combinations of levels and scales, new insights and opportunities can emerge.
Featuring focused studies on specific regions and cities, this state-of-the-art Handbook is essential reading for scholars and researchers of urban studies and regional science, particularly those focusing on the transformation of cities as connected spaces through intracity and intercity networks. Its core theoretical insights will also benefit graduate students in urban studies and network analysis.
What is the meaning of a map? Is it an objective tool or a representation of values? “H. Mazurek invites us to compare the points of view of the geographer as opposed to the cartograph. The author argues that the first one should overcome a cartesian vision and engage in the construction of spaces where territoriality and human behavior are intrinsically linked. Through a critical approach of how maps should represent the true meaning of places and their historical scope, this publication reminds us that spaces are social constructions and indirectly questions the significance of humanitarian mapping. “
“The below “virtual” collage is inspired by PCdO Campos & I Paz study (12) on the mapping of Itaperuna, Rio de Janeiro, BR. In January 2020, the worst floods registered since 1932 impacted dramatically this urban area. The map itself shows the flood occurrence of the Muriae river during the event. The study used highly skilled techniques based on fractal analysis investigating the (lack of) drainage performance and its impact on flooding cartography usage. Confronting the absolute objectivity of sophisticated measurements to the inherent subjectivity of human behavior translates here into a deconstruction-reconstruction process of the mapping. Itaperuna looks fragmented in three parts, but together with the river and its redesigned flooding, they constitute an indissociable whole and an integral part of the social space. All around, silhouettes are talking, lying down, dancing or listening on a background of graffiti, a way to recall the challenge of pedagogy when teaching to non-expert citizens the meaning of urban resilience.”
The rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines has been underpinned by an intricate web of co-patents, intellectual property agreements and lawsuits. Showing them as a network can be useful to highlight the most relevant nodes and the relations they’re embedded into. A preliminary work on this has been recently featured in Nature Biotechnology. Besides reconstructing the main actors in the production of mRNA vaccines, the authors have also analyzed the landscape of scientific terms used in mRNA patents, using a network methodology and the software VOS viewer . A heated debate is underway around the possibility to limit intellectual property rights to facilitate the access to vaccines for developing countries, and network visualization tools can greatly help in understanding the complexity of the relations at stake.
Source: Gaviria and Kilic, 2021: A network analysis of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine patents. Nature Biotechnology, VOL 39, pp. 546–549.
The Covid-19 pandemic has contributed to the daily use of graphics, dashboards and visualizations that helped make sense of its spread and global development. Data are increasingly available and easy to manipulate and diffuse. Big data inform business decisions and policy-making but they play an increasing role also in journalism, higher education and in public debates overall.
The European Journalism Center, supported by the Google News Initiative, have released their second Data Journalism Handbook , an open access e-book that inquires into the foundations, practices and actors of data journalism. The way data are incorporated in public debates is changing the way news are told to the public. Social scientists are also increasingly using big data in their researches, and for these to be relevant to society it is important to be able to disseminate results and communicate them properly. This is why this e-book might also be of interest for academics that wish to communicate and diffuse their research findings.
(Here below: an example from chapter 2 and an application to ethnic segregation in the USA)
Dot-density population map of race in the United States from census estimates, 2018. Source: The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/segregation-us-cities/
Where does your electricity come from? Does your country’s energy portfolio rely mostly on fossil fuels like coal and gas or renewable sources like wind and hydro-electric? The web platform electricity map allows to answer these questions and also to explore international energy exchanges. Besides, electricity map features a wind and sun layers that allow to assess the potential for renewable energy generation in real time!
Electricity map is a project of tomorrow, a Danish start-up. Olivier Corradi, founder and CEO, explains the functioning of electricity map here: (video in French)
Increasing urbanization is a fact, with more than half of the world’s inhabitants living in cities. Cities are often perceived as a problem, but could they be the solution?
A thought-provoking article by Kim Stanley Robinson:
The definition of cities and their limits is always a challenging task. In fact, urbanization patterns are very diverse and they rarely match administrative subdivisions. Thus, if it is often difficult to define where individual cities start and finish, it is even more so to compare cities across countries with very different history and urbanization patterns.
This manual has been produced by six organisations: the European Commission, the FAO, UN-Habitat, the ILO, the OECD and The World Bank. It develops a harmonized methodology to facilitate international statistical comparisons and to classify the entire territory of a country along an urban-rural continuum. The degree of urbanisation classification defines cities, towns and semi-dense areas, and rural areas.
Are you interested in data visualization and you would like to experiment with different charts? Then you might give RawGraph a go. This web-based application lets you import your data, choose between different charts to visualize it, customize it and export it in svg format, ready to publish or further improve.
RawGraph is now available in a 2.0 beta version, but help pages include examples and tutorials for the previous one, so if any problems arise in the version 2.0 you might want to begin exploring the older 1.0 version.
Using RawGraph 1.0 we generated an explorative bumpchart showing the evolution in the number of multinational’s firms inter-urban linkages (logged on Y axis) of different Large Urban Regions from 2010 to 2019. London, New York, Paris and Tokyo are unsurprisingly at the top positions. On the other hand, the performance of Wilmington Delaware would be surprising if we didn’t know that it is one of the world’s leading tax havens and corporate friendly locations. Chinese cities such as Shanghai and Beijing also show sustained growth while Moscow sharply decreases its foreign linkages most likely because of the effects of international sanctions following the Ukraine war in 2014.
An interesting network interactive vizualization of philosophy where lines and connections are more important than the proximity in the network… follow each line to know more about a philosophical (sometimes literature or artistic) domain (unfortunately in French)
The Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2020 presents interactive storytelling and data visualizations about the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It highlights trends for selected targets within each goal and introduces concepts about how some SDGs are measured. Where data is available, it also highlights the emerging impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the SDGs.
The Atlas draws from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators database, as well as from a wide variety of relevant data sources from scientists and other researchers worldwide.
Electric cars are increasingly regarded as an interesting option to lower greenhouse emissions and curb pollution, especially in cities. There is often criticism, however, around a number of critical issues that would make electric vehicles not such a “green” option.
1- Some critics say that electric cars contain a number of rare earth metals whose extraction and processing are intensive in terms of energy demanded and use of chemicals. Furthermore, rare earth elements are mostly provided by China, making it a sensitive geopolitical topic. Other main ingredients in the electric car recipe include lithium, and cobalt, whose extraction also give concerns in terms of their environmental and social impact.
2- Related to the previous point, some critics say that batteries – the main component of electric cars- is not recycled and therefore we would be contributing to generating a large volume of polluting high tech wastes.
3- Where does the electricity for recharging electric cars come from? In countries that still rely on fossil fuels (such as Germany with coal) an important question is wether it is really a greener option to use electricity instead of gasoline?
A Swiss documentary addresses the way these topics are being framed by media and in the public opinion. What they found is that these criticisms are largely unwarranted or at least exaggerated. The team fully dismantled an electric car along with a conventional one, and found no traces of rare earth in the electric ones while they did find them in the catalyzer of the fuel one. Besides, they went to Congo to find that accusations of child labour in cobalt mines are only a marginal part of the story, whereas in Chile they discovered that Lithium production is not so polluting as portrayed. Eventually, the documentary makes the viewer ask the question of: why do I know what I know? Why do conventional and social media give so much attention to negative stories in order to throw bad light on electric cars without questioning conventional ones?
You can watch their trailer below (french only for the moment), and you can find here a list of their sources.
The European Union has recently acknowledged the strategic role of a number of critical raw materials that are used in the ICT, energy and defense industry. As a result, the Joint Research Center of the European Commission has set up a Raw Materials Information Center that collects legal, economic, trade and policy data on strategic raw materials. A particularly interesting tool is the Supply Chain Viewer, that allows to visualize the global production network of a number of raw materials along with the countries of production and the sectors in which they are employed.
“The raw materials Supply Chain Viewer (SCV) provides an overview of networks of selected raw materials supply chains, consisting of supplying countries, material products, product applications, and economic sectors using such products and materials.
Conceptually, this type of data representation is forming a directed graph, i.e. a network consisting of nodes or vertices (four different types, namely countries, materials, applications and sectors) connected together. These connections (named either links or edges) are representing the flows associated to a specific material. More precisely, in technical terms, this is referred to as an acyclic, connected and oriented graph, i.e. a directed graph without multiple/symmetric edges or loops.[5]
Data for the linkages among countries, materials, product applications and sectors were selected mainly from the EC criticality assessment (CRM 2017)[1]. Such underlying data refer to the period 2010-2014. For several cases, where data were not reported in the CRM 2017, missing data were collected from BGS[3] or Eurostat[4]. On each link, a detailing popup displays the data source. In the SCV graph, data is comprised in the connecting links and not in the nodes, these being simply connecting points in the network[2].”
Network visualizations are a powerful way to make sense of the ties between social entities, and they have often been applied to the scientific network connecting researchers and disciplines. Most of the times, these networks have been constructed through citation analysis. Recently, a group of researchers and entrepreneurs from Israel have launched a new platform called Connected Papers where you can build a network around a paper of your choice. A tie between two papers is established not when they cite each other but when their reference overlap to a large extent. You can read more about their story and methodology here or on the application’s webpage.
The Covid-19 pandemic is highly affecting cities because population density favors virus diffusion. Cities are reinventing themselves in order to minimize chances of contagion while staying alive and functioning. A recently released UN-HABITAT platform evaluates how well cities have responded to and coped with the crisis, constituting an informative base for assessing containment efforts and designing upcoming urban policies.
“The web-based visual platform provides scoring for over 1,000 cities including, where data is available, cities with a population of 500,000 or higher along with country capitals and state/provincial capitals for the USA, Brazil, India, and China and allows for the addition of cities as data becomes available.
The COVID-19 Readiness and Responsiveness tracker for cities is a unique scoring mechanism that integrates a range of data points to provide a COVID-19 Readiness Score and a COVID-19 Responsiveness Score on a scale of 0-100.
The Readiness Score is based on five core indicator areas: public health capacity, societal strength, economic ability, infrastructure, and national collaborative will. Meanwhile the Responsiveness Score is based on: spread response, treatment response, economic response and supply chain response. The input data is normalized to provide comparison between cities.
The tracker, available at https://unhabitat.citiiq.com/ is powered by the CitiIQ platform which is capable of sourcing, translating and communicating both the Readiness and Responsiveness scores of cities.”
What do you think of this visualization tool? What dynamics does it help to illuminate? What other sources might be integrated into score measurement? Have a good exploration!
In the past decade, increased digitalization and smartphone ownership have contributed to generate a huge growth in the amount of data that are produced, stocked and manipulated in order to create insights for firms and public institutions. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, proved once more the strategic interest of big data to make sense of the number of infected people, deaths, recoveries, and tracking possible avenues of contagion by mobile apps.
Yet even if big data are very important, do they tell us the whole story? Do smaller but much deeper samples of qualitative data have the potential to tell us a different part of the story and usefully complement them?
This is precisely the proposal that Tricia Wang explains in this article and in this TED talk. During her ethnographic work in China, which included working as a street vendor, and while she was working at Nokia in 2009, Tricia came to realize that developing countries represented a promising market for cheap smartphone diffusion. Yet, Nokia decided not to trust her insights because they were not backed by big numbers. The figures they had told them to try and continue to compete with higher-end smartphone manufacturers. Nokia virtually disappeared from the market in the following years following acquisition by Microsoft, possibly because, as Tricia recalls, “What is measurable isn’t the same as what is valuable”.
In an era in which increased importance is attached to big data, Tricia’s story reminds us not to blindly trust the power of algorithms, and that combining different research methodologies can sometimes yield much deeper and “thicker” results: don’t trade human insights for big data, combine them!
The global pandemic caused by the spread of Covid-19 disease has implied a dramatic reduction of air travel all over the world. Companies have been forced to shrink their operations to the bone, while images of grounded airplanes became the norm. This forced stop will likely have long term consequences and bring to a general restructuring of air transportation. In this contribution three academic experts discuss some of the main issues in this debate:
With most airline companies struggling to survive, some governments have already announced loan or bailout plans, while others have (re)nationalized them or are planning to do so. Yet another approach to the matter is to leave it in the hands of the market and allow these companies to fail. This debate is important because, after the bailout of banks in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the public opinion might question the opportunity of adopting a “too big to fail” strategy implying a huge allocation of public resources to private companies.
The high contribution to CO2 emissions by aviation has been a recurring target of environmental movements in the past years. After months – and possibly years- of public spending to support economies damaged by the global lockdown, the public opinion might be favorable to introduce higher taxes and restrictions to airplane travel.
On the demand side, will the disposition to fly ever come back to pre-coronavirus levels? The tourism industry is unlikely to recover soon, and people might think twice before boarding a busy airplane again. Business travelers, on the other hand, might find it preferable to hold meetings online, consolidating habits that have developed during lockdown.
This article contributes to these issues and stimulates further reflection on the future of air transportation. Have a good read.
TRAVIC is a real-time tracker of public transport that allows the user to visualize the movement of trains, buses, trams and boats all over the world. It is based on a master thesis project by Patrick Brosi in a collaboration between the Swiss based geoinformatics company Geops with the University of Freiburg, Germany. For background information on how TRAVIC is done you may check their blog.
This tracker provides movement visualization of transit data published by transit agencies and operators from all over the world. The movements are mostly based on static schedule data but for some countries, such as for example the Netherlands, real-time data is available and included in the visualization.
Enjoy the visualization, and let us know how you used this tool and what its applications could be.
