Mortality, Poverty and Voting

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The following presents some images used in a parliamentary presentation by Danny Dorling "Whose Voters Suffer if Inequalities in Health Remain". House of Commons, 10th February, 1999. It applies some of the ideas described in Wood et al (1999) The use of the landscape metaphor in understanding population data. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 26, pp.281-295.

The Data

% below breadline % Labour vote

The two point sets were then triangulated to provide a continuous surface. This is a valid transformation as the cartogram projection has effectively weighted the surface by constituency population.

constituency triangulation  

The 2d Visualisation

The two surfaces were then combined using the hue from the %Labour surface and the shading from the % below breadline surface. The triangular artefacts were reduced by quadratic smoothing. A spatial context is given by identifying some of the major urban centres.

% below breadline % Labour vote
% Labour vote over smoothed %below breadline % Labour vote over % below breadline with annotation

The 3d Visualisation

The 'poverty surface' implied by the % below breadline map can be viewed as a 3d landscape with the Labour voting pattern superimposed.

3d view of poverty surface and Labour voting pattern 3d view of poverty surface and Labour voting pattern
3d view of poverty surface and Labour voting pattern 3d view of poverty surface and Labour voting pattern

Production Copies

Production copies of the 'breadline surface' (with triangular artefacts and smoothing), 3d views and annotated surface. All stored as LZW compressed tif files.