All posts by Andy Wheeler

Crime Mapping Friendly Geography Journals

I’m a Criminal Justician/Criminologist by degree, but I think it is important for any academic to be aware of developments not only within their own field, but in outside disciplines as well. It is also good to know of novel outlets with which to publish your work.

Here I have listed a few geography oriented journals I believe any Criminologist interested in crime mapping should be cogniscent of. I chose these for mainly two reasons; 1) the frequency with which they publish directly pertient criminological research, 2) my perceived quality of the journals and articles that are contained within (e.g. it is good just to read articles in the journal in general given their quality). I also list some examples of (mostly) recent criminological work within each journal.

Applied Geography

The Professional Geographer

There was recently a special issue, that was devoted to crime mapping topics. See the below article and the subsequent pertinent articles in that same issue.

Also for other examples see

Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Of course this is not an exhaustive list, but you can check out the articles I have posted in my citeulike library for other hints at crime mapping relevent journals to watch out for (you can search for specific journal titles in the library, see this example of searching for Applied Geography in my library). Also check out the crime mapping citeulike library I upload content to regularly (this will have a more specific crime mapping focus than my general library, although they largely overlap).

If you think I’ve done some injustive leaving a journal off the list, let me know in the comments!

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by Andy Wheeler on January 2, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Mapping
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Posted by Andy Wheeler on January 2, 2012

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2012/01/02/crime-mapping-friendly-geography-journals/

Some example corrgrams in SPSS base graphics

I was first introduced to corrgrams in this post by Tal Gallil on the Cross Validated site. Corrgrams are visualization examples developed by Michael Friendly used to visualize large correlation matrices. I have developed a few examples using SPSS base graphics to mimic some of the corrgrams Friendly presents, in particular a heat-map and proportional sized dot plot. I’ve posted the syntax to produce these graphics at the SPSS developer forum in this thread.

Some other extensions could be made in base graphics fairly easily, such as the diagonal hashings in the heat-map, but some others would take more thought (such as plotting different graphics in the lower and upper diagonal, or sorting the elements in the matrix by some other criterion). I think this is a good start though, and I particularly like the ability to super-impose the actual correlations as labels on the chart, like how it is done in this example on Cross Validated. It should satisfy both the graph people and the table people! See this other brief article by Michael Friendly and Ernest Kwan (2011) (which is initially in response to Gelman, 2011) and this post by Stephen Few to see what I am talking about.

One of the limitations of these visualizations is that it simply plots the bi-variate correlation. Friendly has one obvious extension in in the corrgram paper when he plots the bi-variate ellipses and loess smoother line. Other potential readings of interest that go beyond correlations may be examining scagnostic characteristics of distributions (Wilkinson & Wills, 2008) or utilizing other metrics that capture non-linear associations, such as the recent MIC statistic proposed in Reshef et al. (2011). All of these are only applicable to bi-variate associations.

Citations:

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by Andy Wheeler on December 21, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Data Visualization, SPSS
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Posted by Andy Wheeler on December 21, 2011

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2011/12/21/some-example-corrgrams-in-spss-base-graphics/

Hello world!

Feel free to navigate to the About Me page to get to know a little about who I am. As a brief introduction to what I plan to blog about, I have waiting in the thralls (many) potential posts on data management and constructing statistical graphics in SPSS. I may also throw in some posts in general on data visualization, on making maps, and research tips.

I don’t plan on saying much here in direct relation to my research agenda (you can read the boring papers in the C.V. section if you are interested in that),  but posts on said topics may sneak in from time to time.

I make no guarantees on the regularity with which I post. Unless of course you want to pay me to blog!

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by Andy Wheeler on December 15, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized

Posted by Andy Wheeler on December 15, 2011

https://andrewpwheeler.com/2011/12/15/hello-world/

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