Glasgow Subcrawl Map

Created using the QGIS atlas generation feature. Does not contain all pubs, only the ones that were in Open Street Map at the time of creation.

Glasgow’s (in)famous sub-crawl, a mightily booze-sodden tour of the city via its subway. Participants buy an all-day Discovery ticket (£3.80) for the world’s third-oldest underground system (London is oldest, then Budapest) and get off for a drink at the nearest pub to all 15 stations on the six-and-a-half-mile circuit. By anyone’s standards, it is a stern test of constitution, and often used as a coming-of-age ceremony for graduating students.

The Guardian

Click on the image to see all stations in the flickr album.

1 of 15 - Hillhead

Mapping With WMS – SNH – John Muir Way

While Web Mapping Services (WMS) are becoming more common, their functionality is limited. They are easier to set up and run than a Web Feature Service (WFS) but are mainly useful for pre-rendered or background mapping.

Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) provide an extensive amount of datasets as WMS, through their Natural Spaces data store.

I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of result could be achieved using only WMS.

The result is a map of the John Muir Way, which is a long distance walking route in the central belt of Scotland. Apart from the way itself (it was not provided through the WMS), all data is obtained through the SNH WMS. Some styling could be done using the colorize and layer blending options in QGIS.

WMS Mapping

Scottish Independence Referendum 2014, Election Maps in QGIS

As everyone will no doubt have heard, Scotland voted in a referendum on independence on the 18/09/2014. The vote was no, but it presents an excellent opportunity to visualise election results.

Addition From Black

Addition From Black

We start with a black background since in RGB 0,0,0 is pitch black. Then we have 2 datasets with graduated colour scheme from completely transparent to completely red/blue. We use the percentages per council area to show the split, but using absolute counts could also work. These layers have the blending mode of “Addition” so they stack creating a purple map, with the redder areas voting no and the bluer areas voting yes.

Bar Graph

Bar Graph

This is more of a proof of concept than a truly functional map. The bars are created from the polygon centroids as a line symbol. The length of each bar plotted in meters from a calculation of the number of votes * 1000. I found out that this could be more easily created using the diagrams feature, which would produce the same result without the need for creating centroids and allow for more placement options.

Data Driven Opacity and Hue

Data Driven Opacity and Hue

Simple Red to Blue gradient from the percentage of yes votes. So from 30% to 70%, providing a nice gradient of the vote outcome. Above this was place a completely white layer, which had its alpha channel driven by a normalized total voters field. So Glasgow has a white 100% transparent feature over it, while Orkney has a 0% transparent feature. This symbolises the impact of each councils vote and the result.