Posts tagged as "geography"

Islands of the North Atlantic Part 2 - The Dis-United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

This is part two of The Islands of the North Atlantic. In the first part of this occasional series of articles, I set the scene for what the United Kingdom is by tackling some common misconceptions of what the United Kingdom isn't.

  1. This is not the United Kingdom You're Looking For
  2. The Dis-united Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  3. The Geographies of England - An Exercise in Complexity
  4. Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh Geographies - Simplicity not Complexity
  5. Crown Dependencies, Overseas Territories and the Commonwealth of Nations

But the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that we know today only dates back to 1922, so I'm going to start with what the United Kingdom was and for that we need to go back to circa 927 CE and the Kingdom of England.

Islands of the North Atlantic Part 1 - This is Not the United Kingdom You're Looking For

It was back in February of 2009 that I first wrote about the complex and confusing geographies of the British Isles, the United Kingdom and many other terms of reference for the archipelago of islands that sit off of the north-west coast of Europe and that I call home. Since then, with one notable exception, I have found myself having the same conversations on this topic at pretty much every place I've worked at.

So this is the first in a series of articles about the physical, political, administrative and other geographies of what's sometimes called the Islands of the North Atlantic, which should put this to rest ... until something else changes.

  1. This is not the United Kingdom You're Looking For
  2. The Dis-united Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
  3. The Geographies of England - An Exercise in Complexity
  4. Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh Geographies - Simplicity not Complexity
  5. Crown Dependencies, Overseas Territories and the Commonwealth of Nations

The Geography Of Talking

Apart from being a damn fine Trance album, German DJ Paul Van Dyk's The Politics of Dancing would definitely make my top 5 list of album titles, if I had one. I love the way the two normally diametrically opposed ideas of politics and dancing are used together to make something new.

Here's another example which is much more geo related; the geography of talking.

A group of researchers have redrawn the map of Great Britain using human interactions, in this case people talking to each other on the telephone, to show how little the way in which we communicate and the relationships we have bear any resemblance to the formal boundaries that governments draw on a map. In the map below, the total amount of talk time is shown, with the maps areas being more opaque the more calls and interactions are made.

What Happens When Geography and Innovation Collide

It's taken a while but the consultation into opening up the Ordnance Survey's United Kingdom mapping and geographic data is out and is no doubt being debated, looked at, discussed, pulled apart and opined on. Whilst every Ordnance Survey employee I've ever spoken to is utterly in favour of this move there's still continued resistance to openness, though the gap between the two extremes of FreeOurData and the UK Government's Cabinet Office is closing and closing fast. Of course, it doesn't help when the Ordnance Survey asserts rights over the crime maps produced by London's Metropolitan Police either.

Is it Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the British Isles or what exactly?

In February 2009 I wrote a post for the Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog about how people outside of the United Kingdom are sometimes confused by the vagaries of how to correctly write street addresses in the UK and if the United Kingdom is a country and if England is a country then how can England be part of the United Kingdom. Some pointed comments to the original post ensued from the likes of Ed Parsons from Google and Andrew Larcombe from the British Computer Society's Geospatial Specialist Group.