MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library



    Escaping the pushpin paradigm in geographic information science: (re)presenting national crime data


    Singleton, Alex D and Brunsdon, Chris (2014) Escaping the pushpin paradigm in geographic information science: (re)presenting national crime data. Area, 46 (3). pp. 294-304. ISSN 0004-0894

    [thumbnail of CB_Singleton_et_al-2014-Area.pdf]
    Preview
    Text
    CB_Singleton_et_al-2014-Area.pdf

    Download (1MB) | Preview

    Abstract

    In 2011 the Home Office released the police.uk website, which provided a high-resolution map of recent crime data for the national extents of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Through this free service, crimes were represented as points plotted on top of a Google map, visible down to a street level of resolution. However, in order to maintain confidentiality and to comply with data disclosure legislation, individual-level crimes were aggregated into points that represented clusters of events that were located over a series of streets. However, with aggregation the representation of crimes as points becomes problematic, engendering spurious precision over where crimes occurred. Given obvious public sensitivity to such information, there are social imperatives for appropriate representation of crime data, and as such, in this paper we present a method of translating the ‘point’ crime events into a new representational form that is tied to street network geography; presenting these results in an alternate national crime mapping portal http://www.policestreets.co.uk
    Item Type: Article
    Keywords: neogeography; GIS; policing; Geoviz;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > National Centre for Geocomputation, NCG
    Item ID: 8052
    Identification Number: 10.1111/area.12116
    Depositing User: Prof. Chris Brunsdon
    Date Deposited: 23 Mar 2017 12:20
    Journal or Publication Title: Area
    Publisher: Wiley Blackwell
    Refereed: Yes
    Related URLs:
    URI: https://mu.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/8052
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

    Repository Staff Only (login required)

    Item control page
    Item control page

    Downloads

    Downloads per month over past year

    Origin of downloads