Weeknotes #32, July 28th, 2023

After helping Open Benches to dramatically reduce the page load of their homepage, Stuart wrote up a blog post with tips for optimising GeoJSON files.

At some point in the next year or two it is expected there will be a General Election. That always gets us thinking about constituency hex cartograms. Paul has proposed that we have a place that lets people see various things (TBD) on hex cartograms. We are thinking we will make a site using our OI Lume Viz visualisation tools. In preparation for the sorts of things we might want to be able to do, Stuart has been adding the option for interactive sliders.

We have been focused on the spotlight pages, in particular housing. This has required some further data prep from both Luke with statXplore and Christian with EDD. Primarily, this has involved reformatting data and ensuring we have all time-series data, where it exists. Most of this is background work, but over the next few weeks the content on the actual pages will scale up dramatically. We will be adding more detailed visualisations and showing some time series data to see how things have changed over time. We are excited to show JRF our updates on Monday!

We are excited to announce a new data project working with Lowr. We want to find the most credible and user-friendly carbon emissions data, as part of our #PlanetData mission. The first step in this partnership is to help them find credible emissions factors for travel. Then we will put it all in one place in a useable, accessible format. Our aim is to create a first version of a travel emissions factors catalogue which Lowr can use. We don’t want to repeat work that already exists, and we do want to find the most credible datasets to use. Read Luke's introductory blog and follow the GitHub repo