Bike Share Paper in PLOSONE

After much wrangling and rewriting, my first paper as a social physicist has finally been published! It’s one I wrote with the help of CASA’s Ollie O’Brien, Ema Strano at EPFL and Matheus Viana, currently at UC Irvine and appears in open access journal PLOSONE. You can download and read it here. The paper itself deals with using spatial network models to understand patterns of bike usage in a number of cities, and detecting “communities” of cycle movement within each. For now, though, I thought I’d just collect together some of the visualisations I’ve produced from the same journey datasets for London, Boston, and Minneapolis – these weren’t dwelt on in the paper, but using inferred routings from OpenStreetMap data gave us our first visualisations. It seems fitting that we come full circle, back to the visualisation work that inspired the later explorations.

And here’s a relatively new one of London, showing all of the journey data over six months projected onto one day:

I’ll talk about the methods and results from the paper in the future. If people would like to hear about the methods used in the visualisation, I may blog about that too; or you can learn the techniques needed on the MRes ASAV course, which I lead. Applications are open now for 2014 entry!