UK Parliament Scottish Constituencies & Members – Political Knowledge Atlas (5 Nov 2019)

UK Parliament Scottish Constituency Knowledge Seed Branch

Branch Outline Shape   Fill Colour    Image    Text    Note     Spreadsheet Table    Index Marker Tags & Goups    Attached Hyperlinks

MindManager provides an unparalleled range of ‘information cartography’ functionality that enables  contextual knowledge to be embedded and attached to map branches in multiple ways…

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Branch Outline Shape 
For geographic area seed branches the outline shape indicates the nature of it’s borders with it’s equivelant neighbours…

CIRCLE = all coastal borders (ie. ‘island(s)’)

HEXAGON = all land borders (ie. ‘land-locked’)

ROUNDED RECTANGLE = mixed coastal & Land borders

Note(s)
i) Assignment of shapes to geographic area seed branches is controlled by MindManager’s unique Smart Rule feature using the ‘UK PARL CONS – Borders Types’ tag (eqivelant to thematic mapping in GIS).

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Fill Colour: Political Affiliation
The colour of the branch indicates the political party affiliation of the incumbent elected member (MP), or as an ‘independent’.

Note(s)
i) Assignment of fill colour to electoral area seed branches is controlled by MindManager’s unique Smart Rule feature using the ‘UK PARL CONS – Current Political Party’ tag.

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Image: Thumbnail Location Map
MindManager allows a single image to be embedded within a branch, which may be sufficient for the requirements. However with a bit of forethought (and some software ‘jiggery pokery’ 🙂 ) we can also create one that incorporates more than one visual element so that, like the ‘rich’ branch text, more core knowledge can be ‘packed in’ to a single branch without visually overwhelming the user.

‘Thumbnail’ Constituency Location Map – The thumbnail ‘boundaries only’ map (which has been created by us) shows the constituency area within Scotland.

Note(s)
i) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.

ii) Due to the disparate nature of the size of the geographic areas of UK Parliamentary Constituencies, locations are not always immediately obvious for the smallest ones. If you zoom in on-screen, all will become clear though!

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  Text: Official Name & Unique Identifying Codes
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual characters within a single text ‘string’ – we can pack several different pieces of ‘core knowledge’ into the text of a single branch without it visually overwhelming the user.

Note(s)
i) All names and codes are meticulously sourced from official sources to ensure unambiguous identification of the council body and easy cross-referencing with other data sources, especially GIS databases (though it’s still not without it’s contradictions – see below!).

Constituency Name – We have taken the names of the Constituency from the parliament website.

ONS Code – The UK Government Office for National Statistics – in partnership with the devolved governments – maintain a series of codes to uniquely represent a wide range of geographical areas of the UK (such as Council Areas and Electoral wards), for use in tabulating census and other statistical data, known as ‘ONS codes‘ or ‘GSS (Government Statistical Service) codes’.
Although the codes are not formally hierarchical like the previous system it replaced, ONS codes for the same type of geographic area start with the same 3 characters…

• S12 = Unitary Authority
• S13 = Ward or Electoral Division 
• S14 = Westminster Parliamentary Constituency
• S15 = European Electoral Region
• S16 = Scottish Parliament Constituency
• S17 = Scottish Parliament Electoral Region
• S21 = National Park
• S22 = Travel to Work Area
• S23 = Police Force Area
• S34 = Workplace Zone
• S92 = Country

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  Note: Election Log
Additional knowledge can be attached to the branch in the form of a note. This is basically as rich an environment as a word processor page, so ‘rich’ text, tables and images.

Election log – The incidence and results of general elections and by-elections in constituenciess will be logged here.

Note(s)
i) By-elections in the Scottish Constituencies of the UK Parliament are infrequent, with the last one taking place in Inverclyde on 30 June 2011. That may be ‘only’ 8 years ago, but 3 (probably soon to be 4) parliaments ago!

ii) As with mapping Local Councillors, it has proved impossible to find ‘official’ sources of information about changes to the political circumstances in Constituencies and / or MPs in the institution’s (ie. the UK Parliament’s) ‘official’ website, especially the ‘old’ version.

iii) As is so often the case in our knowledge mapping work, the only place where such information is gathered in the one, easily accessible place and freely accessible in the public domain, is Wikipedia. However…

• how quickly after the event the information appears on is another matter…
• … if at all (and we have no way of knowing it’s missing).

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  Spreadsheet Table: Recent Election Results (coloured by party)
As well as the ability to link to, and import, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, MindManager also (again uniquely) has it’s own in-built spreadsheet tool that allows users to create their own from scratch within a branch. This provides yet another way of packing in a lot more visually structured knowledge into a single map branch eg. election results, colour coded by political party for easier comprehension!

Note(s)
i) If appropriate, and it’s correctly structured, embedded spreadsheets can be toggled between the Table View and a Chart View of the data. However this feature is only available within MindManager. Whatever view is set there at the point of export, is the one that will appear in the HTML version of the map.

ii) Like Embedded Data Fields, Embedded Spreadsheets can be hidden / shown by clicking the green toggle arrow just above the top right corner.

Recent Election Results (coloured by party) – This embedded spreadsheet shows results of General Elections and by-elections in the constituency going back to 1997 (if applicable), coloured by political party for the winning candidate and their majority. It provides ‘at a glance’ contextual political knowledge. The results are taken from the Wikipedia article for the constituency, which contains the list of candidates and results of all general elections, as well as useful background historical knowledge (which makes it the ‘go to’ single source of general election knowledge that we have found).

Note(s)
i) The Scottish Parliament was re-established on 6th May 1999 after the devolution referendum of 11th September 1997. This is why we show UK Parliament elections results going back to the 1997 if applicable.

ii) There was a major review of consituency boundaries by the Boundary Commission in Scotland in 2005, which was required under the Scotland Act 1998 to reduce the number of Scottish constituencies from 72 to 59. This is why the results only go back to the 2005 election for many constituencies (though the Wikipedia article has results for the historical consitutuency for context).

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  Index Marker Tags & Goups: Various
A variety of Index Markers arranged into groups are used throughout the map to tag branches as appropriate and enable map filtering and quick navigation. Marker groups can be copied and used to do the same in any other maps.

Note(s)
i) Within MindManager tags…

• provide a useful means of internal navigation between map topics (clicking on the branch that is shown as being tagged with that marker in the ‘Index Task Pane’ will immediately focus the map on that banch).
• can be generated automatically from branches (the title of the parent branch is the group name and those of all the immediate sub-branches become the individual tags within the group) .
• can be copied and pasted in their groups from one map to another.

NAVIGATION (‘NAV’) MARKERS
‘Navigation’ index markers tag the topics that they are named after. They provide another way of navigating the map – clicking on the tag in the index pane takes the user  straight to the tagged topic.

NAV – UK Parliament Constituency – Each UK Parliament Scottish Constituency seed branch is tagged with it’s own index marker (it’s name), created from the branch text itself. Thus there are 2 ‘parts’ to the marker tag – Constituency name (ONS Code) eg. Glasgow North Constituency (S14000031).

POLITICAL MARKERS
‘Political’ index markers tag branches with knowledge about the party political electoral process…

UK PARL CONS – Type – Historically there were several diferent types of UK Paliamentary Constituency, with significant differences between the way each worked. However since the advent of universal suffrage, the differences between county and borough constituencies are slight.
From Wikipedia:-
“Borough constituencies are predominantly urban while county constituencies are predominantly rural. There is no definitive statutory criterion for the distinction; the Boundary Commission for England has stated that, “as a general principle, where constituencies contain more than a small rural element they should normally be designated as county constituencies. Otherwise they should be designated as borough constituencies.”[1] In Scotland, all House of Commons constituencies are county constituencies except those in the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee and three urban areas of Lanarkshire”.

UK PARL CONS – Current Political Party – Designation of sitting MP’s current party affiliation (tag is coloured as per the usual UK political party colours).

GEOGRAPHIC (‘GEO’) MARKERS
‘Geomarker’ index markers provide ‘spatial intelligence’ in a map by tagging topics as being part of a specific geographic area of various ‘types’ – administrative, electoral, statistical, topographic etc. The areas do not need to be topics in the map for them to be a ‘Geomarker’. They are the equivalent of ‘Lookup Tables’ in ‘GIS’.

GEO Borders
The nature of the area’s  borders with it’s equivelant neighbours…

UK PARL CONS – Borders Types – This Marker Group indicates the status of the constituency’s borders with all of it’s equivalent neighbours, in respect to the ocean (as per the topic shape). Thus these tags will enable the filtering of a map to show / hide those areas that do / do not have a coastline.
Possible tags…

• All Coastline (Island)
• Mixed
• No Coastline (Land-locked)

UK PARL CONS – Shared Land Borders – This Marker Group indicates which other UK Parliamentary Scottish Constituency(s) that the selected constituency shares a mutual border with, as shown on the Ordnance Survey Election Map online viewer.
On mainland Scotland UK Parliament constituency borders are contiguous i.e. there are no ‘gaps’ between them, so they have a complex interplay with shoreline, freshwater lochs, rivers, estuaries (firths), sea lochs and the ‘extent of the realm’ (the national boundary offshore). Thus in some cases constituencies share a mutual border on a water feature rather than land.
The ‘islands’ – Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles – are far enough away from the mainland that they do not share a mutual boundary with any others.

GEO Unique Identifying Codes
Within the branch text we incorporate unique identifiers codes for geographic areas for easy cross-reference with other data sources, especially GIS databases.
We also add some of the truly unique codes as ‘geo’ index marker tags to the topic. Only one topic in the map will have that ‘geo tag’. This offers interesting possibilities for adding further content at a later date.

UK PARL CONS – UK EU-NUTS2 Region – The European Union Statistics Agency (Eurostat) maintains a list of ‘Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS)‘ codes for it’s constituent member states (including Scotland as part of the United Kingdom) for statistical reporting & comparison purposes. Each member state has a parent NUTS code, and then there are 3 levels of ‘NUTS code’ for the statistical reporting areas, which in Scotland equate to…

• NUTS for member state = United Kingdom = UK
• NUTS 1 = Scotland = UKM
• NUTS 2 = Regional groupings of Scottish Council Areas…
• NUTS 3 = A ‘rag-tag’ mixture with codes covering sub-groupings of neighbouring council areas within the NUTS 2 region, single council areas for ‘large’ councils, and in the case of the ‘super large’ Highland Council area, internal geographic subdivisions along ‘historic county’ lines.

This means…

• NUTS 2 ‘regions’ don’t correspond exactly to any other way of subdividing Scotland regionally e.g. Scottish Parliament Electoral Regions (even though the nomenclature may by similar).
• NUTS 3 codes are not always unique to individual councils i.e. they cannot be used as unique identifiers.
• NUTS 3 codes don’t always follow Local Council Area boundaries e.g. the Island of Arran is part of North Ayrshire Council Area (NUTS 3 = UKM33), but is included in the ‘Highlands and Islands’ (NUTS 3 = UKM63) area for EU statistical reporting purposes.

There are 2 ‘parts’ to the marker – NUTS 2 area name (NUTS 2 Code) eg. South Western Scotland Region (UKM3).

UK PARL CONS – ONS Code – The Constituency’s official identifying code given by the UK Government Office for National Statistic (ONS) in partnership with the Scottish Government, as per the Branch Text above.

GEO ‘Look-Up Geographies
In the world of Geographic Information (GI) a ‘look up’ defines the link between one geographic feature and another. Most commonly this is between geographic areas of different ‘types’. For example a Local Council Electoral Ward will also coincide with ‘higher’ electoral geographies of Scottish Parliament Constituencies & Regions, and United Kingdom Parliament Constituencies. Of course the boundaries of the different geographies do not necessarily coincide or ‘nest’ exactly (though they might have done at one time). Thus relationships are often ‘one to many’, or even ‘many to many’, which is ‘database speak’ for ‘it’s complicated’.
Relationships are usually derived using computerised spatial analysis, with the results stored in ‘look-up tables‘ in databases or spreadsheets. ‘Geo’-tagging map branches that represent geographic areas is our hopefully useful alternative.
You can get more of an idea of the complexities of UK Geographihies from the handy UK Office of National Statistics Beginners Guide To UK Geography.

UK PARL CONS – UK Home Nation – As it sounds. The presence of this tag has been inherited from prior Knowledge Mappers’ maps of all the constituencies in the UK Parliament in the one map. The tag consists of just the name ‘Scotland’.

UK PARL CONS – Scottish LCs – All the Scottish local council areas that overlap with the UK Parliament Constuencies. There are usually at least 2.
There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Council Name (ISO3166-2 Code – ONS Code) eg. East Renfrewshire Council (GB-ERW – S12000011).

UK PARL CONS – Scottish Electoral Wards – All the Scottish Local Council Electoral Ward areas that overlap with the UK Parliament Constituencies. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Electoral Ward Name (LGBCS Ward Number – ISO3166-2 Code – ONS Code) eg. Barrhead, Liboside and Uplawmoor (Ward 1 – GB-ERW – S13002914).

UK PARL CONS – Scot Parl Region – Scottish Parliamentary Consituencies are distributed between regions, which also have elected members. The marker is just the Scottish Parliamentary Constituency Region Name  eg. West Scotland.

UK PARL CONS – Scot Parl Cons – All the Scottish  Parliament Constituencies that overlap with the UK Parliamentary constituency. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Scottish Parliamentary Constituency Name (ONS Code) eg. Eastwood (S16000103).

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  Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.