Digital Geography
I'm at the Digital Geography in a Web2.0 World conference. I'm looking at a slide showing the geographic distribution of people called "Batty". I leave you to guess which part of the UK is Batty-est.
The conference is presented by . The map of names has attracted . We're currently being shown a global map of surname distribution: following how names move over time is one way of tracking demographic changes.
For example the next slide we're being shown illustrates a map of Greek names in London. This is interesting because these are ethnic/national groups not captured by the census.
UPDATE: Andrew Hudson-Smith gave a visually stunning presentation on what the CASA Centre was doing with virtual geography in games and second life. I had a brief chat with him afterwards. Here's what he had to say for himself
He also maintains an excellent blog (to which I'm now a subscriber) at