Tag: Present day

• Does a local MP get a local bonus?

  

  Parties now pick far more local candidates. Across every MP elected since 1832, being born near the seat wins about 1.3 points more of the vote, but has not made local MPs any less likely to lose.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  Birthplaces, Britain, elections, Electoral results, Georgian, Parliament, political parties, Present day, Twentieth century, UK, Victorian

• The trig pillar network: how Britain was measured

  

  I mapped all 6,573 Ordnance Survey trig pillars and tested the rule they were built to: every station must see its neighbours. Using the surveyed station heights over a modern terrain model, 95% of neighbouring primary stations still can; random lines of the same length, 11%.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  Britain, Heritage, Hills and mountains, landscape, Line of sight, old maps, Ordnance Survey, Present day, Terrain model, UK

• Named for a place, living somewhere else?

  

  Thousands of species are named after a place. I matched 2,901 of them to GBIF records: 98% of those I could test are recorded in that country. The coco de mer, named for the Maldives, grows in the Seychelles.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  GBIF, Naming, place names, Present day, Wikidata, wildlife, World

• Booth’s poverty map today

  

  I read Charles Booth’s 1898 to 1899 poverty colours along every street of today’s inner London and set them against deprivation in 2025. The poorer streets of the 1890s are still slightly more deprived (rank correlation 0.20), and only very locally: slide the old map 1 km and most of the link goes.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  cities, history, industry, London, old maps, Persistence test, Poverty and wealth, Present day, Victorian

• Who gets talked about? What the public looks up on Wikipedia, and what Parliament talks about

  

  I set a year of Wikipedia reading against twenty-one years of Commons debate for 1,425 UK towns and cities. The two mostly agree, but a town with a seat named after it gets 2.2 times the mentions, and Welsh places are talked about more, not less.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  Britain, Hansard, Parliament, Present day, Public attention, technology, Text mining, UK, Wikipedia