Telling stories with big data
How CASA created the UK’s largest data display for the London Transport Museum.
So-called ‘Big Data’ sets are often so large or complex that our traditional methodologies can’t process them. How then do we make all that information genuinely useful?
This was the problem London Transport Museum posed Dr Ed Manley at The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) in 2015, when he was given the task of redeveloping the museum’s ‘Connections’ wall display.
The data for Connections would be drawn from the Capital’s transport network – from underground and overground trains, buses, riverboats and bicycles, to bus stops, tracks, signals, platforms and stations. Working with interaction agency Kin Design, Manley and his colleagues Gareth Simons and Richard Milton first created Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) to capture, clean and sort the data from its myriad sources.
“We propagated the visualisation part of the Connections display with that information – all in real time,” says Manley. “We then developed a narrative to describe compelling transportation phenomena in London. This took the form of 12 multi-modal case studies.”
The result is the UK’s largest data display, combining striking 3D design, 55,000 model buildings, projection and transport information.
This project builds on CASA’s expertise in building data ‘dashboards’ for users such as the Greater London Authority and the Africa Centre for Population Health in South Africa.
“The dashboards enable users to visualise data in terms of key metrics and performance indicators, and enable them to monitor and act on that information in real time,” says Manley.
Contact Ed Manley: ed.manley@ucl.ac.uk
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