Alex Singleton

Educational Opportunity: The Geography of Access to Higher Education

admin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 16:00:36 +0000

My book ‘Educational Opportunity: The Geography of Access to Higher Education’ has just been published by Ashgate and summarises much of my educational research over the past 5 years

More information is available is available on this flyer.

Abstract

While in recent years the burgeoning Higher Education (HE) sector has been set an agenda of widening participation, few HE institutions have strategies in place for reaching the full range of potential students who would most benefit from (and successfully complete) their current subject and course offerings. Universities and colleges are often unsystematic in the ways in which they identify schools and colleges for outreach and widening participation initiatives, and sometimes uncoordinated in how they present the full institutional profile of subjects of study in these activities. Using innovative methodology, this book sets out some relevant aspects of the changing HE policy-setting arena and presents a systematic framework for widening participation and extending access in an era of variable fees. In particular, this book illustrates how HE data and publicly available sources might enable institutions to move from piecemeal analysis of their intakes to institution wide strategic and geographically linked market area analysis for existing and envisaged subject and course offerings.

Singleton, A.D. (2010) Educational Opportunity: The Geography of Access to Higher Education. Farnham, Ashgate.

The Surname Regions of Great Britain

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:17:40 +0000

The British Population retains a strong sense of regional identity, epitomized by periodic campaigns for Scottish and Welsh devolution, or for Cornish self-government. There have been few studies into the regionalization of British surnames and none that utilize any register that can claim to be nationally representative. The National Social Map presented in this paper is the first comprehensive attempt to create a regional geography of Great Britain based upon the clustering of surnames. The resulting map illustrates a strong relationship between the population’s surnames and geographic location. The homogeneity within each of the surname regions identified is striking given that spatial contiguity constraints were not included within the clustering process. The map will hopefully set a bench-mark for future work by geographers in the field of surname research.

Cheshire, J.A., Longley, P.A. and Singleton, A.D. (2010) The Surname Regions of Great Britain, v2010, 401-409. 10.4113/jom.2010.1103

The article can be downloaded here.

Research Agenda

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:07:37 +0000

I have been asked on two occasions in the past month to present on the topic of my current and future research activity (both methodological and substantive). These draw together my activities over the past seven years at UCL made up of both PhD and Post Doctoral research.

I have uploaded both these talks to slideshare for anyone who is interested:

Shorter Talk: Current and Future Research

My Current and Future Research

View more presentations from Alex Singleton.

Longer Talk: Socio-Spatial Differentiation – People, Places and Interaction

Socio-Spatial Differentiation – People, Places and Interaction

View more presentations from Alex Singleton.

Towards Real-Time Geodemographics: Clustering Algorithm Performance for Large Multidimensional Spatial Databases

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:51:35 +0000

Geodemographic classifications provide discrete indicators of the social, economic and demographic characteristics of people living within small geographic areas. They have hitherto been regarded as products, which are the final “best” outcome that can be achieved using available data and algorithms. However, reduction in computational cost, increased network bandwidths and increasingly accessible spatial data infrastructures have together created the potential for the creation of classifications in near real time within distributed online environments. Yet paramount to the creation of truly real time geodemographic classifications is the ability for software to process and efficiency cluster large multidimensional spatial databases within a timescale that is consistent with online user interaction. To this end, this article evaluates the computational efficiency of a number of clustering algorithms with a view to creating geodemographic classifications “on the fly” at a range of different geographic scales.

Muhammad Adnan , Paul A Longley, Alex D Singleton and Chris Brunsdon

The paper can be downloaded here.

Spatial Interaction Modelling, Geodemographics for Higher Education

admin — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:10:28 +0000

CASA Conference – Spatial Interaction Modelling, Geodemographics for Higher Education

View more presentations from oliverobrien.

Presented by Oliver O’Brien.

Advances in Geographic Data Visualisation

admin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:57:35 +0000

Advances in Geographic Data Visualisation

View more presentations from Alex Singleton.

NYC Cab Flow Data

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 08:24:59 +0000

NYC Yellow Cabs have GPS fitted to them which have been tracked for the past year or so… anyway, there is an excellent article on this in the New York Times with obligatory map visualization:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/nyregion/03icab.html

map (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/04/02/nyregion/taxi-map.html?ref=nyregion)

If we assume that taxi are the generally present in areas where people
are, this could be a useful source of population mobility and certainly the sort of data which may be useful in real-time geodemographics.

My Google Street View Chronology

admin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:52:57 +0000

I am very excited by the massive expansion of Google Street View which I blogged about elsewhere. It is a good opportunity to present my Google Street View chronology:

1980 – 1988

Alnwick, Northumberland

1988-1990

Alnmouth, Northumberland

1990-1993

Allestree, Derby

1993-1998

Shenley Church End, Milton Keynes

1998-1999

Frimley, Surrey

1999-2003

Central Manchester, Manchester

Hulme, Manchester

Longsight, Manchester

Withington, Manchester

2003-2004

Worcester, Worcestershire

2004-2005

Witney, Oxfordshire

2005-2006

West Hampstead, London

2006-2010

Catford, London

Spot the Error on Google Maps

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:20:24 +0000

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Neogeography & Participatory GIS

admin — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 08:23:53 +0000

I just had notification of an article I recently wrote for a special issue of GIS Development on Neogeography. This is available online: here or to download as a PDF here.

In brief, my article provides an overview of Neogeography and then details where I think the next developments will occur.