Data Windows

This is a data visualisation artwork created by Dr Cheshire (@spatialanalysis) and myself. We were invited to submit an entry to 10X10 Drawing the City London, run by the building design charity Article 25. The submissions, including various from “real” artists and architects, will then be auctioned in November to raise funds for the charity’s projects.

Our technological, cartographical and geographical skills are almost certainly better than our artistic ability, so we decided to let technology create our artwork. We took the 2011 census data for the target area (Shoreditch) and combined it with building data from Ordnance Survey Vector Map District, creating a 3×3 panel. Colorbrewer colour ramps, supplied in QGIS 2.0, were used, to colour each panel differently.

The resulting artwork is completely based on open data, licensed under the Open Government Licence.

A single physical copy was printed directly onto white canvas, using specialised equipment operated by Miles Irving at the Drawing Office in UCL Geography. He mounted it onto a wooden frame. The resulting artwork can be seen above and has now been passed to Article 25 for their exhibition and auction next month.

Update: They invited us back for 2014 and 2015, and we produced maps for these latter two editions too.

2014 was taken from an old high-resolution Ordnance Survey map, which we vectorised and stylised:

Our 2015 map was from GIS digital raster data – using a high-resolution DEM for our square, and styling it in Illustrator: