Jo Wood

@jwolondon.bsky.social

Posts

Professor of Visual Analytics who does datavis, visualization storytelling and natural travel. Did I mention visualization?

Posts Replies Media

In the 2019 UK general election, two thirds of MPs won with an absolute majority. In 2024, that figure was 15%. The contrast is even greater for the Conservatives. In 2019, 288 Conservative MPs had absolute majorities. In 2024, there was just one (Bob Blackman in Harrow East))

Provisional maps of first and second places in each constituency with two left to declare. The second place map is interesting, with strong showing for the Greens in London and Bristol, and Reform in the NW and NE

UK General Election watchers wondering when to go to bed on 4th/5th July? Perhaps this may help. It includes approximate declaration times and some of the more interesting results to look out for. observablehq.com/@jwolondon/e...

Election 2024: When should I go to bed?observablehq.com The PA have released estimated times of general election declarations through the night of 4th-5th July. While the values are approximate (based on 2019 declarations), I've used them here to estimate ...

Variation in predicted general election results from 13 MRP polls released in the last month (larger circle=greater differences in MRPs predictions) Shows how poorly Scotland is served by them and highlights the interesting anomalous constituencies. More here: observablehq.com/@jwolondon/u...

While there's little doubt that the UK General Election on 4th July will see a new Labour Government in power, it is striking how different the current MRP opinion poll models are. A useful reminder that 'confidence interval' is not the same as prediction accuracy. observablehq.com/@jwolondon/u...

Job opportunity! My colleague Sara Heitlinger is looking for a postdoctoral researcher with HCI experience to join her on this super-interesting project 'More-than-Human Sustainable and Inclusive Smart Cities'. www.city.ac.uk/about/jobs/a... Deadline for applications: 29th June 2024

Details | City, University of Londonwww.city.ac.uk Details of job vacancy at City, University of London

Polling in the last year has consistently suggested the current Conservative government is on the way out in the coming general election. But which parliamentary seats are likely to change hands? Here's some mapping of the forecast provided by Election Data Vault. observablehq.com/@jwolondon/u...

For anyone here planning any maps / datavis related to the UK general election (July 2024), I've assembled two aligned geo/hex boundary files here. I am following a 'literate data' approach to describe the data shaping process as well as provide the data. observablehq.com/@jwolondon/u...

UK Election 2024: Boundary Dataobservablehq.com Summary Two aligned datasets representing the 650 Westminster parliamentary constituencies up for election in July 2024. One shows geographic boundaries, the other a 'hex cartogram' where each constit...

Sign of the times. (At the base of a very windy climb up Clough Head today)

Some exciting datavis news! Our Centre for Doctoral Training in Diversity in Data Visualization has been awarded over £9m funding today for 60 PhD positions, offering career paths to currently under-represented groups in the data visualization sector #EPSRC_CDTs. www.city.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

Visited Hampton Court maze yesterday - one of the oldest still functioning non-unicursal hedge mazes. I've used the visit to explore mazes as a teaching tool for some basic graph theory: observablehq.com/collection/@...

Looking forward to a month of early starts and programming fitness. Anyone else intending to do adventofcode.com this year? I know there are many R programmers here. Would be interesting to how well it can be used for the puzzles. I'll be using JavaScript and observablehq.com.

I like how trying to get Dalle to produce typographic samples is like a child learning their alphabet. They start off well, get a bit lost in the middle and then recover as they remember they have to finish on Z.

The 'Library of Babel' is an instructive framing of 'information' and the quest for truthfulness: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lib... And this short paper from Bottou & Schölkopf makes a convincing case for Borges' library and magical realism as an apt metaphor for LLMs. arxiv.org/abs/2310.01425

For all its faults I do like the expressiveness afforded by the ChatGPT interface to Dalle. If nothing else it is helping me to improve my understanding of compositional form, texture and palette.

Q. for #visionScience and #datavis friends. We often use the analogy of vis as 'language' ('grammar of graphics', 'visual vocabulary', 'semiology of graphics' etc.). Is this just analogy or are there studies/evidence to support a deeper connection between vis and language processing? (Sapir-Whorf?)

Fox in clover.

One of the things I like about the 'computational notebook / literate visualization' paradigm is how it affords structured 'thinking aloud'. In that spirit: some thoughts on visualizing set membership. Can we extend UpSet plots for more general propositional logic? observablehq.com/@jwolondon/u...

UpSet Plots and Propositional Logicobservablehq.com UpSet plots are designed to show the relative abundance of different set relations (usually intersections). For example, suppose we had three sets: 'Fruit', 'Red things', 'Round things' and in a roo...

End of feed.