Ben Hennig at Berkhamstead

There's a chance to see the wonderful Ben Hennig (and his cartograms) as he is speaking at the GA's branch at Berkhamsted school later this week. It's free to attend the event.

Tuesday 19 January 2016, 7pm Centenary Theatre, Berkhamsted School

Dr Benjamin Hennig: Visualisations of the Anthropocene –   investigating humanity’s impact on the Earth

Ben Hennig joined Oxford University’s School of Geography and the Environment in September 2013 as a senior research fellow. He works on spatial data analysis and geovisualisation. His research interests include social and spatial inequalities, humanity's impact on Earth, global sustainability and new concepts for the visualisation of these issues. Ben was educated at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. After working as a research assistant and departmental lecturer in human and urban geography at the Urban and Social Geography Working Group of the Department of Geography, University of Cologne (Germany) he joined the Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Group at the University of Sheffield (UK) in 2008 where he completed his PhD in 2011 as part of the Worldmapper project with research on visualising the social dimensions of our planet. He then worked as a research assistant and then as a senior research fellow at the Department of Geography in Sheffield before he joined the University of Oxford. Further information about his work can be found on his personal website: www.viewsoftheworld.net

All lectures are held in the Centenary Theatre of Berkhamsted School (Kings Campus), Kings Road, Berkhamsted, HP4 3BG. Entry is free.

I worked with Ben on a number of projects, including the LondonMapper project - check that out.....

Image created by Benjamin D. Hennig. You are free use the material under Creative Commons conditions (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0); 

LondonMapper

“Our aim is to provide unbiased information about London's social, environmental and economic issues.

“These maps are like fancy pie charts, and if something is twice the size of something else it is obvious. We just want to spark a debate about the differences in one big city.”

Professor Danny Dorling

London called me on Thursday this week, and I went down to the RGS to meet with Ben Hennig.

Ben and I are working on some educational materials for a project called LondonMapper - a website which officially launched today, funded by the Trust for London.
The educational materials are being funded by an Innovative Geography Teaching grant that we have been awarded by the Royal Geographical Society.

Ben's maps will be familiar to many from his work on WorldMapper with Danny Dorling and others from Sheffield University.
Ben now works at the University of Oxford, still with Danny Dorling, and LondonMapper is one of several exciting projects that he is working on.

The site got a lot of early publicity and was featured in quite a few of the newspapers today.
- the Guardian
- Daily Mail
- the Independent
for example...

Explore the data on this Guardian Datablog page, which includes the hedgehog map and peregrine falcon map created along with Daniel Raven Ellison as part of the Greater London National Park project

The site will be expanded in the next few weeks with a whole tranche of new maps.

By the end of the summer term, there will also be a teaching resource which I will have created. The bones of the resources already exist, and I will be working on that over half term.

Also keep an eye out for further London Mapping resources that I'll be creating in the Summer term.