The Development of Web-Based Interface to Census Interaction Data

This project involves the development of a Web interface to origin-destination statistics from the 1991 Census (in a form that will be compatible with planned 2001 outputs). It provides the user with a set of screen-based tools for setting the parameters governing each data extraction (data set, areas, variables) in the form of a query. Traffic light icons are used to signal what the user has set so far and what remains to be done. There are options to extract different types of flow data and to generate output in different formats. The system can now be used to access the interaction flow data contained in the 1991 Special Migration Statistics Sets 1 and 2 and Special Workplace Statistics Set C. WICID has been demonstrated at the Origin-Destination Statistics Roadshows organised by GRO Scotland and held during May/June 2000 and the Census Offices have expressed interest in using the software in the Census Access Project

Measuring Confidentiality Risks in Census Data

Two trends have been on a collision course over the recent past. The first is the increasing demand by researchers for greater detail and flexibility in outputs from the decennial Census of Population. The second is the need felt by the Census Offices to demonstrate more clearly that Census data have been explicitly protected from the risk of disclosure of information about individuals. To reconcile these competing trends the authors propose a statistical measure of risks of disclosure implicit in the release of aggregate census data. The ideas of risk measurement are first developed for microdata where there is prior experience and then modified to measure risk in tables of counts. To make sure that the theoretical ideas are fully expounded, the authors develop small worked example. The risk measure purposed here is currently being tested out with synthetic and a real Census microdata. It is hoped that this approach will both refocus the census confidentiality debate and contribute to the safe use of user defined flexible census output geographies

Measuring Confidentiality Risks in Census Data

Two trends have been on a collision course over the recent past. The first is the increasing demand by researchers for greater detail and flexibility in outputs from the decennial Census of Population. The second is the need felt by the Census Offices to demonstrate more clearly that Census data have been explicitly protected from the risk of disclosure of information about individuals. To reconcile these competing trends the authors propose a statistical measure of risks of disclosure implicit in the release of aggregate census data. The ideas of risk measurement are first developed for microdata where there is prior experience and then modified to measure risk in tables of counts. To make sure that the theoretical ideas are fully expounded, the authors develop small worked example. The risk measure purposed here is currently being tested out with synthetic and a real Census microdata. It is hoped that this approach will both refocus the census confidentiality debate and contribute to the safe use of user defined flexible census output geographies

Interaction Data Sets In The UK: An Audit

Interaction or flow data involves counts of flows between origin and destination areas and can be extracted from a range of sources. The Centre for Interaction Data Estimation and Research (CIDER) maintains a web-based system (WICID) that allows academic researchers to access and extract migration and commuting flow data (the so-called Origin-Destination Statistics) from the last three censuses. However, there are many other sources of interaction data other than the decadal census, including national administrative or registration procedures and large scale social surveys. This paper contains an audit of interaction data sets in the UK, providing detailed description and exemplification in each case and outlining the advantages and shortcomings of the different types of data where appropriate. The Census Origin-Destination Statistics have been described elsewhere in detail and only a short synopsis is provided here together with review of the interaction data that can be derived from other census products. The primary aims of the audit are to identify those interaction data sets that exist that might complement the census origin-destination statistics currently contained in WICID and to assess their suitability and availability as potential data sets to be held in an expanded version of WICID. Tables or flow data sets are included for exemplification. The paper concludes with a series of recommendations as to which of these data sets should be incorporated into a new information system for interaction flows that complement the census data and also provide opportunities for new research projects

Commentary on ‘Evaluating methods for measuring daily walking to public transport: Balancing accuracy and data availability’

Active commuting has been widely identified as beneficial, both through direct association of physical activity and health and through a wider linkage of commute mode to satisfaction and well-being (Smith, 2017). However, many commutes are multi-modal, and to ignore walking or cycling trips as the first or last stage of a commute is to ignore a significant amount of activity

An Age-Period-Cohort Database of Inter-Regional Migration in Australia and Britain, 1976-96

Report prepared as part of a collaborative project on "Migration Trends in Australia and Britain: Levels and Trends in an Age-Period-Cohort Framework" funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Australian Research Council. This paper describes the way in which parallel databases of inter-regional migration flows for Australia and Britain, classified by five year ages and birth cohorts for four five year periods between 1976 and 1996. The data processing involves estimation of migration data for comparable spatial units, the reduction of the number of those units to a reduced set for ease of analysis, the extraction of migration data from official data files supplied by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Office for National Statistics, and the filling of gaps in these files through iterative proportional fitting for some of the British data. The final stage in preparation of the migration databases was to estimate the numbers of transitions (Australia) or movements (Britain) for age-period-cohort spaces. In principle, this last estimation involves a fairly simple interpolation or aggregation of age-time classified migration data, but in practice a great deal of detailed attention is required. A final section specifies the populations at risk to be used for each age-period-cohort observation plan to compute migration intensities

Harmonising Databases for the Cross National Study of Internal Migration: Lessons from Australia and Britain

This project involves the development of a Web interface to origin-destination statistics from the 1991 Census (in a form that will be compatible with planned 2001 outputs). It provides the user with a set of screen-based tools for setting the parameters governing each data extraction (data set, areas, variables) in the form of a query. Traffic light icons are used to signal what the user has set so far and what remains to be done. There are options to extract different types of flow data and to generate output in different formats. The system can now be used to access the interaction flow data contained in the 1991 Special Migration Statistics Sets 1 and 2 and Special Workplace Statistics Set C. WICID has been demonstrated at the Origin-Destination Statistics Roadshows organised by GRO Scotland and held during May/June 2000 and the Census Offices have expressed interest in using the software in the Census Access Project

Joint and multi-authored publication patterns in the Digital Humanities

The stereotype of the multi-authored Digital Humanities paper is well known but has not, until now, been empirically investigated. Here we present the results of a statistical analysis of collaborative publishing patterns in Computers and the Humanities (CHum) (1966–2004); Literary and Linguistic Computing (LLC) (1986–2011); and, as a control, the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (AAAG) (1966–2013) in order to take a first step towards investigating concepts of ‘collaboration’ in Digital Humanities. We demonstrate that in two core Digital Humanities journals, CHum and LLC, single-authored papers predominate. In AAAG, single-authored papers are also predominant. In regard to multi-authored papers the statistically significant increases are more wide-ranging in AAAG than in either LLC or CHum, with increases in all forms of multi-authorship. The author connectivity scores show that in CHum, LLC, and AAAG, there is a relatively small cohort of authors who co-publish with a wide set of other authors, and a longer tail of authors for whom co-publishing is less common

Technologies for Migration and Population Analysis: Spatial Interaction Data Applications

This initial chapter has two aims. Firstly, it seeks to clarify definitional and conceptual issues relating to the key interaction phenomena, migration and commuting, on which we concentrate in this book and for which we strive to obtain information to enhance our understanding of the processes that are taking place in the real world. The chapter explains the conceptual distinction between migrants and migrations, the importance of which becomes clear when the difference between transition and movement data is outlined, and it considers the alternative units of migrant measurement that are used such as individuals, wholly moving households and moving groups. Whilst migration tends to be measured over a period of time, typically a year, commuting is an activity that occurs on a much more frequent basis and consequently is usually measured as the numbers making a journey on one day. The chapter indicates how commuting to work and commuting to study are defined and measured. Secondly, the chapter contains the summary of an audit of interaction data sources, outlining the characteristics of the different types of data that are available from censuses, registers and surveys. Particular emphasis is placed on the former, the Census of Population, for which there are a number of data products providing migration and commuting counts at different spatial scales and disaggregated by various attributes; micro data are distinguished from macro data. However, the chapter also introduces a range of other interaction data sources such as the registers of National Health Service patients, the Pupil Level Annual School Census, the databases of the Higher Education Statistics Agency, various national level surveys such as the Labour Force Survey and the International Passenger Survey. In some cases, the data are exemplified using tables or maps. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the importance of the census as a key data source for small area analysis and a plea that, in a post-census world, sufficient steps be taken by central government to ensure the creation and provision of information systems for monitoring migration and commuting in an effective way, providing accurate and reliable intelligence on trends and creating opportunities for new research projects that develop explanations