Scottish Parliament Regions, Constituencies & Members – Political Knowledge Atlas (10 Apr 2020)
- 10 April 2020
The Scottish Parliament elects it’s 129 members by a mixed member proportional representation (MMP) – 73 to single member consisuencies by ‘first past the post’ & 7 to each of the 8 Electoral Regions system – every 5 years (the last election was in May 2016). Though these politicians fundamentally affect our lives on a day-to-day basis – be they ministers in the government of the day responsible for policy & the delivery of services, or supporting it from the ‘back benches’, or part of the opposition holding it to account, or ‘just a local MSP’ working on behalf of their constituents – it’s difficult to get the big picture AND the detail, AND how both have changed over time, in the one source. This first ever political knowledge atlas of the elected members, constituencies of the Scottish Parliament in Scotland helps solve that problem in a single, information rich, intuitive to navigate, easy to share, digital document.
Structured by Electoral Region and coloured by poitical party when appropriate, there are knowledge seed branches for every electoral region and constituency within them. Embedded within each is a contextual thumbnail location map and spreadsheet table of ‘All Election Results’ at region or constsuency level since the parliament was established in 1999, whilst there are attached multiple links to general, geographic & electoral knowledge resources about them.
There are also knowledge seed branches for all the current Scottish MSP’s (with those that have retired or died since they were last elected retained as sub-branches for reference), each with embedded official portrait picture and their previous electoral victories as data fields. Collections of sub-branches of links to ‘Official Parliamentary’, ‘Official Party & MSP Controlled’ and ‘Externally Controlled’ knowledge resources about each MSP – with multiple selected links also attached to the seed branches – complete this first ever national local knowledge map of all the Scottish Parliament’s regions, constituencies & MSPs. It also provides a comprehensive & robust visual knowledge framework upon which to build other maps in the future and, with the next Scottish General Election scheduled for May 2021, that future is not that far away…
Our Scottish Parliament Regions, Constituencies & Members – Political Knowledge Atlas is the ideal starting point for ‘thumb & brain friendly’ desktop (or even ‘in the field’) research for anyone with an interest in the political make up of any, or all, of the Scotish Parliament’s 8 Electoral Regions and 73 Constituencies, and the 129 members (MSPs) elected to them. It is made up of visual framework of…
2 x 8 Scottish Parliament Electoral Regions political knowledge seed branches – with unique identifying codes, embedded thumbnail location map image and a spreadsheet table coloured by party showing the results – one set showing combined regional & component constituency results, the other just regional results – of all the elections so far, as well as attached multiple hyperlinks to core general, geographic & electoral knowledge resources, and index markers that also tag them with some of the contextual knowledge.
73 Scottish Parliament Constituencies political knowledge seed branches – with unique identifying codes, embedded thumbnail location map image and a spreadsheet table coloured by party showing the results (votes cast, winning majorities and turnout) of the most recent elections in the constituency, as well as attached multiple hyperlinks to core general, geographic & electoral knowledge resources, and index markers that also tag them with some of the contextual knowledge.
128 Scottish Parlaiment Elected Members (MSPs) – 56 Regional (‘List’) and 59 Constituency – political knowledge seed branches – coloured by political party with their embedded official profile image, their ‘electoral victory history’ as data fields, and notable changes in circumstance since they were last elected recorded as a branch note, as well as attached multiple hyperlinks to ‘Official Parliamentary’ (eg. official profile page(s) & entry in the register of members interests), ‘Official Party & MP Controlled’ and ‘Externally Controlled’ knowledge resources, and index markers that also tag them with some of that contextual knowledge.
Each of these MSP seed branches also has collections of sub-branches, each with a single hyperlink to official / definitive / plain old useful ‘Official Parliamentary’, ‘Official Party & MSP Controlled’ and ‘Externally Controlled’ knowledge resources about them found in the public domian.
Official Parliamentary Knowledge Resource Link Collection – This includes their official profile page(s) on the Scottish Parliament website, their contact details, official email address and register of members interests.
Official Party & MSP Controlled Knowledge Resource Link Collection – This includes the MSP’s official profile on their Party’s website, their own official website and their social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter.
Externally Controlled Knowledge Resource Link Collection – This includes the MSP’s entry on pro democratic process transparency websites run by social enterprises and volunteers such as The Public Whip (voting record), TheyWorkForYou (more detailed analysis of their voting), Who Can I Vote For? by Democracy Club (crowd-sourced details of the MSP as an election candidate), and, if there is one, their Wikipedia article.
Together these elements establish a comprehensive & robust visual knowledge framework upon which we can build many other maps about the ‘national local’ building blocks of Scotland based on the political makeup of Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Regions and Constituencies and their elected members (MSP’s) in the future.
MindManager Users – As with all our maps, the MindManager (.mmap) version of this map is also both a base map to add your own content to, or a source of content that can be added to your own existing maps.
Explore the other tabs for comprehensive descriptions of the knowledge seed branches and knowledge link collections that make up this knowledge atlas map….
- 1,763 Map branches, containing...
- 2,950 Hyperlinks to official / definitive / plain old useful public domain knowledge resources, about the...
- 8 Scottish Parliament multi-member Electoral Regions, and the...
- 73 Scottish Parliament single-member Constituencies within them, and the...
- 129 members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) elected to them in the 2016 Scottish General Election (and any subsequent by-elections)...
- 56 Regional ('List') Members (MSPs) elected by the Additional Member System (AMS), and...
- 73 Constituency Members (MSPs) elected by the 'First Past The Post' system
Part of the 'Governance & Politics' Category
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Knowledge seed branches provide a ‘base level’ of contextual knowledge about the subject embedded within, or attached to, them in the form of…
Image [Embedded] – Such as thumbnail location maps, flags, icons, people profile pictures etc., which provide a unique visual element that users can instantly latch on to as they navigate their way through the map.
Text [Embedded] – Rich (ie. variably formatted) branch text – such as names & unique identifying codes (taken from official sources) – is a unique MindManager feature.
Note [Attached] – Contains supplementary information with all the elements of a word processed page – variably formatted (‘rich’) text, tables and images.
Spreadsheet Table / Chart [Embedded] – Containing contextual facts & figures, which can be toggled between table and chart view as appropriate (once again unique to MindManager).
Multiple Single Data Fields [Embedded] – Another way of adding contextual facts & figures to the map (once again unique to MindManager), these are like single cells in a spreadsheet and the values can be used to format the topic.
Index Marker Tags [Attached] – Arranged in groups and added to individual branches as appropriate, tags add contextual knowledge, enable map filtering and navigation.
Multiple Hyperlinks [Attached] – Another unique feature, multiple links to a range of official definitive / plain old useful knowledge resources about the subject of the seed branch – usually selected from the full range of general & geographic knowledge resource collections – help turn the map into a knowledge portal without adding to the visual clutter.
All the seed branches and their associated embedded / attached contextual knowledge elements used in this map are described in detail below…
Scottish Parliament 'Scotland As A Whole' Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region ‘Region As A Whole’ Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
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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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 ‘jigery 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.
Note(s)
i) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.
‘Thumbnail’ Boundary Overview & Location Map – The double thumbnail map (which has been created by us) is comprised of…
- Main map – A low resolution screenshot of the official overview boundary map for the region produced as a PDF by the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland (LGBCS) – the body officially tasked with defining electoral areas and their boundaries in Scotland – and showing the boundary of the region and it’s con sitiuencies against an Ordnance Survey basemap.
- Thumbnail location map – as used in the other types of seed branches in the map showing the boundaries of electoral regions in Scotland, with the selected electoral region coloured in red.
Note(s)
i) The link to the actual PDF map is included in the <Multiple Hyperlinks> attached to the branch.
ii) Due to the disparate nature of the geographic extent of equivelant administrative and electoral areas in Scotland, their locations are not always immediately obvious from the map for the smallest ones. If you zoom in on-screen, all should become clear though!
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Text: NAME & Code
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters 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 administrative / electoral area / body and easy cross-referencing with other data sources, especially GIS databases (though it’s still not without it’s contradictions – see below!).
REGION NAME – Region name in UPPER CASE.
ONS Code – The UK Government Office for National Statistics (ONS) – 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
Scotish Palriament – Given the number of branches in our maps, the screen space can fill up quite quickly as users drill down the hierarchy and expand their content. Thus we may repeat contextual knowledge from ‘further up’ the map hierarchy wherever expedient so users can more easily keep track of what they’re looking at. Also given the increasing number of Scottish electoral systems – local and national – covered by the Scotland The Map project, it is now possible to be comparing multiple knowledge maps onscreen at the same time. Given the repeated use of the same or similar sounding geographic names across the different systems, it again helps the users to repeat the ‘high level’ contextual knowledge.
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Note: MSP Changelog
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.
MSP Changelog – With 2 different electoral systems in play, the political changes we hope to record in this note will come about in different ways…
- Regional Level – There are no ‘regional by-elections’. If a Regional List MSP dies in office or resigns, than in theory the next available un-elected candidate on the party’s regional list will take over (though see note below). However if the individual concerned has moved on in life and no longer ‘wants the gig’ (especially if this is happening a long time after the election), the party will work it’s way down it’s list until they find a former candidate that does fancy giving it a go.
- Constituency Level – If a Constituency MSP dies in office or resigns, then that will trigger a by-election (though see note below).
Note(s)
i) Constituency By-elections or changes in the regional MSPs in the Scottish Parliament are relatively infrequent. Even if an MSP is successfully elected to the UK Parliament at a UK General Election, they are not obliged to resign as an MSP and so a by-election is not automatic.
ii) As with mapping Local Councillors, it has proved impossible to find ‘official’ sources of information about changes to the political circumstances in Regions, Constituencies and / or MSPs in the institution’s (ie. the Scottish Parliament’s) ‘official’ website.
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: Previous Election Results & Number of MSP’s by Party (Combined Region & Constituency)
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.
Previous Election Results & Number of MSP’s by Party (Combined Region & Constituency) – This embedded spreadsheet shows the combined regional and constituency level results results of all Scottish General Elections in the Electoral Region for each party – number of votes & MSP’s elected – going back to the first in 1999, coloured by political party. It provides ‘at a glance’ contextual political knowledge. The results shown in the table are a combination of the results in the Regional and Constituency Summary seed branches.
Note(s)
i) An explanation of the voting system for the Scottish Parliament – which is a dual vote system of ‘first past the post’ constituencies and proportional representation in electoral regions – can be found on Wikipedia here.
ii) The recommendations of the first review of Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region & Consituency boundaries were enacted in time for the 2011 Scottish General Election so it may not be comparing like with like for earlier results.
Index Marker Tags & Goups: Various
A variety of Index Markers arranged into groups are used throughout the map to tag branches with contextual knowledge 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 branch 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 – Scottish Parliament Region –Each Scottish Parliament Electoral Region SUMMARY seed branch is tagged with it’s own index marker, created from the branch text itself. Thus there are 2 ‘parts’ to the marker tag – Region name (ONS Code) eg. Highlands and Islands (S17000011).
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…
SCOT PARL REGN – Shared Land Borders – This Marker Group indicates which other Scottish Parliament Electoral Region(s) that the selected region shares a mutual land border with, as shown on the Ordnance Survey Election Map online viewer.
On mainland Scotland electoral area 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.
SCOT PARL REGN – ONS Code – The Region’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.
SCOT PARL REGN – Scot Parl Cons – All the Scottish Parliament Constituencies that are located within the Electoral Region. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Constituency Name (ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute (S16000083).
Note(s)
i) Because of the way the dual electoral system works, Constituencies are only ever part of one Electoral Region.
SCOT PARL REGN – Scottish LCs – All the Scottish local council areas that overlap with the Scottish Parliament Region. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Council Name (ISO3166-2 Code – ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute Council (GB-AGB – S12000035)
SCOT PARL REGN – SLC Wards – All the Local Council Electoral Wards that overlap with the Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region. As is usually the case in Scottish electoral geography, whilst many Local Councils are wholy within the one Scottish Parlaimentary Region and even Constituency, it is not always the case, and sometimetimes even Local Council Electoral Wards are split between them. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Local Council Electoral ward Name (LGBCS Ward Number – ISO3166-2 Code – ONS Code) eg. Cowal (Ward 6 – GB-AGB – S13002521).
SCOT PARL REGN – UK Parl Cons – All the UK Parliament Constituencies that overlap with the Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – UK Parliament Constituency Name (ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute (S14000083).
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Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region ‘Region As A Whole’ Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Internal Links
These are links to other branches in the map (i.e. ‘internal’ as opposed to ‘external’ i.e. URLs’), for internal navigation purposes. When clicked, the map view will re-focus from the ‘jumpimg off’ to the ‘destination’ branch.
Note(s)
i) Not necessarily 2 way – The ‘destination branch’ at the other end of the internal link may not necessarily have a link back to the branch you jumped from.
The following internal links are attached to this seed branch…
Electoral Regions – There is an internal link to each Electoral Region main branch.
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region ‘Region As A Whole’ Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
General Knowledge Resource Links 
Geographic Knowledge Resource Links 
Electoral Knowledge Resource Links Internal Links
One of our philosophies at KnowledgeMappers is not to reinvent the wheel whenever possible. Thus we include hyperlinks to original official / definitive / plain old useful knowledge sources whenever possible, as well as links to Wikipedia pages for additional, “bigger picture” context (often not obvious, or even absent from, the original source). By doing this…
- original sources get used more often, by more people.
- errors get spotted quicker, thereby improving the information quality for everybody.
- updates get promulgated sooner to end users.
- rather than us having to interpret original sources to create further information resources around “big picture” context for a subject we are not experts in, users of our map can “get it straight from the horses mouth” as it were, so everybody benefits.
Note(s)
i) MindManager has the unique ability to have multiple hyperlinks attached to a single map branch, and to edit the default title text of the link to make it more meaningful to the user. This…
- greatly reduces the visual clutter of the map.
- means a full basket of links to official / definitive / useful knowledge resources about the subject can stay with the seed branch if it is re-used in other maps.
The chain icon at the end of a branch (rather than the favicon (icon) served by the linked-to website) indicates where a branch has more than one hyperlink.
ii) In the circular knowledge economy way of Wikipedia if there is knowledge that you could add to an existing page that is linked to, or even starting a page that doesn’t yet exist, then go for it! That’s what it’s all about!
iii) Not all of the resources below will exist for all constituencies.
The following knowledge resource links are attached to this seed branch (arranged in alphabetical order within the groupings)…
General Knowledge Resource Links
Wikipedia – Article on the Scottish Parliament Electoral Region – As well as the full history of elections and elected members for the region, the Wikipedia consituency article includes the general history. This is especially useful flagging up material changes to consituency boundaries over the years.
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Geographic Knowledge Resource Links
Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland – First Review Region Map [PDF & online viewer] – The LGBCS helpfully publish GIS produced, region and constituency boundary maps in PDF (i.e. static) format as part of their periodic review process. The maps show the boundaries against an Ordnance Survey basemap, and can be easily printed if required.
Current boundaries were enacted at the 2011 election after the first review in 2010.
Note(s)
i) The Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland took over responsibility for reviewing Scottish Parliament Electoral Region and Constituency boundaries from the Boundary Commission for Scotland in 2017. As part of the impending Scottish Elections (Reform) Act 2020, it’s name will be changed to Boundaries Scotland..
Ordnance Survey Election Maps Viewer – This online map viewer has been created by Ordnance Survey as part of their duties to create and maintain detailed maps of all electoral areas in Great Britain.
Note(s)
i) It is not possible to link to individual map views in the viewer, so users will have to manually ‘switch on’ the ‘Scottish Parliament Electoral Regions’ and/or ‘Scottish Parliament Constituencies’ layers from the selection panel on the left side of the window.
ii) Ordnance Survey’s BoundaryLine GIS dataset is freely available to download as part of OS Open Data.
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Electoral Knowledge Resource Links
BBC News Election Results – Region – The BBC News website has the last (2016) Scottish General Election results at national and individual constituency level (with a small amount of consistuency profile information).
Who Can I Vote For? by Democracy Club – Constituency Elections – This is a ‘newly discovered by us’ website that not only lists all UK local and national elections and by-elections since 2016 (as well as the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections), but also has crowd-sourced details about all the candidates standing in each and every constituency or ward (eg. links to their official websites and social media as well as previous elections they may have stood in that they have details of). For this ‘Scotland as a whole’ branch there is a single link to the 2016 General Election page with a list of links to each of the 2016 Region Election pages. Note there will be also be a page for the impending 2021 Scottish General Election in due course.
Note(s)
i) The Democracy Club community interest company and associated volunteers are to be congratulated for the ‘Herculean’ efforts in creating this comprehensive, publicly accessible and free to use knowledge resource about all elections in the UK, and we do not envy them their task! The Who Can I Vote For? website is a constant work in progress so we’re sure it will change in the future, but as it stands right now, from our ‘knowledge mapping of links’ point of view, we have a few observations…
Elections
- There is one ‘All Elections’ page that, as the title suggests, lists all the UK elections covered by the site…
- European Parliament
- London Assembly
- Local Council
- Mayoral
- Police and Crime Commissioner
- Northern Ireland Assembly
- Referendum
- Scottish Parliament
- Senedd Cymru
- UK Parliament
- These are listed first by calendar date of occurence (in reverse order), and then alphabetically within that date group. So there is not a single page for a particular Constituency (or any other electoral area covered) that lists the links to all the elections that have happened there, including subsequent by-elections 🙁 .
- As can be imagined from the list of type of elections covered above, there is a lot to scroll through to find what you want (there is no search or filtering feature). So you really have to know the date when the election you are interested in happened in order to find it on the page before you can start drilling down. That said all the Scottish Local Council general elections take place on the same day (the first thursday in May), which helps (the same is not true for by-elections obviously).
- Elections in individual constituencies are not listed on this page, instead it will say ‘Scottish Parliament elections or by-election’. Clicking on that link will take you to an ‘index page’ where the individual constituencies in which an election has occured on that date (obviously all of them in a General Election) are listed in alphabetical order, and you then click on that link to get to the actual election page where the candidate listing is.
- After the election, the constituency page of all the candidates is updated to list the number of votes for each candidate as well as indicating which one was successfully elected. However there is no other data on the election itself – the total electorate, turnout etc. – which means that this is not an ‘everything you want to know about the election in the constituency all conveniently gathered into the one place’ knowledge resource (in the same way the election listing on Wikipedia only shows the results with no information about the candidates other than their party as the vast majority of them will not have a Wikpedia page that can be linked to).
- No unique identifying codes are used for the electoral units anywhere on the site and so units they are only identified by name.
Candidates / Elected representatives
- The contents of an individual candidate / elected representative’s page is entirely dependent on what’s been added by local volunteers and so it varies a lot – from ‘no further information on this person’ (including no profile picture), to all their social media accounts.
- It also relates to the last election they stood in, which could be in a different political ‘arena’. For example it is not uncommon for local councillors to stand for election as a member of the UK or Scottish Parliaments.
- A far as an individual’s election history section goes this is entirely dependent on what’s in the database. Thus if they stood for election before 2016, unless it was at the 2010 or 2015 UK General Elections, this section will be blank.
Wikipedia – Election results subsection of Scottish Parliament Region Article – As noted in the General Links section above, the Wikipedia article on the constituency has the history of elections and elected members for the constituency.
Note(s)
i) As a crowd-sourced resource the quality, breadth and depth of the content of Wikipedia articles is entirely reliant on volunteers, who are able to source (and link to) reliable information found elsewhere in the public domain. In our experience it may be the case that…
- not all election results may be reported for every constituency.
- even if there is a long history of results, there may actually have been intervening boundary changes so the constituency is not exactly the same over time, even though it’s called the same name. These are not always picked up by Wikipedia contributors.
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Internal Links
These are links to other branches in the map (i.e. ‘internal’ as opposed to ‘external’ i.e. URLs’), for internal navigation purposes. When clicked, the map view will re-focus from the ‘jumpimg off’ to the ‘destination’ branch.
Note(s)
i) Not necessarily 2 way – The ‘destination branch’ at the other end of the internal link may not necessarily have a link back to the branch you jumped from.
The following internal links are attached to this seed branch…
Electoral Regions – There is an internal link to each Electoral Region main branch.
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region 'Region As A Whole' Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region ‘Region As A Whole’ Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
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…
.
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 ‘jigery 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.
Note(s)
i) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.
‘Thumbnail’ Boundary Overview & Location Map – The double thumbnail map (which has been created by us) is comprised of…
- Main map – A low resolution screenshot of the official overview boundary map for the region produced as a PDF by the Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland (LGBCS) – the body officially tasked with defining electoral areas and their boundaries in Scotland – and showing the boundary of the region and it’s con sitiuencies against an Ordnance Survey basemap.
- Thumbnail location map – as used in the other types of seed branches in the map showing the boundaries of electoral regions in Scotland, with the selected electoral region coloured in red.
Note(s)
i) The link to the actual PDF map is included in the <Multiple Hyperlinks> attached to the branch.
ii) Due to the disparate nature of the geographic extent of equivelant administrative and electoral areas in Scotland, their locations are not always immediately obvious from the map for the smallest ones. If you zoom in on-screen, all should become clear though!
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Text: NAME & Code
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters 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 administrative / electoral area / body and easy cross-referencing with other data sources, especially GIS databases (though it’s still not without it’s contradictions – see below!).
REGION NAME – Region name in UPPER CASE.
ONS Code – The UK Government Office for National Statistics (ONS) – 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
Scotish Palriament – Given the number of branches in our maps, the screen space can fill up quite quickly as users drill down the hierarchy and expand their content. Thus we may repeat contextual knowledge from ‘further up’ the map hierarchy wherever expedient so users can more easily keep track of what they’re looking at. Also given the increasing number of Scottish electoral systems – local and national – covered by the Scotland The Map project, it is now possible to be comparing multiple knowledge maps onscreen at the same time. Given the repeated use of the same or similar sounding geographic names across the different systems, it again helps the users to repeat the ‘high level’ contextual knowledge.
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Note: MSP Changelog
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.
MSP Changelog – With 2 different electoral systems in play, the political changes we hope to record in this note will come about in different ways…
- Regional Level – There are no ‘regional by-elections’. If a Regional List MSP dies in office or resigns, than in theory the next available un-elected candidate on the party’s regional list will take over (though see note below). However if the individual concerned has moved on in life and no longer ‘wants the gig’ (especially if this is happening a long time after the election), the party will work it’s way down it’s list until they find a former candidate that does fancy giving it a go.
- Constituency Level – If a Constituency MSP dies in office or resigns, then that will trigger a by-election (though see note below).
Note(s)
i) Constituency By-elections or changes in the regional MSPs in the Scottish Parliament are relatively infrequent. Even if an MSP is successfully elected to the UK Parliament at a UK General Election, they are not obliged to resign as an MSP and so a by-election is not automatic.
ii) As with mapping Local Councillors, it has proved impossible to find ‘official’ sources of information about changes to the political circumstances in Regions, Constituencies and / or MSPs in the institution’s (ie. the Scottish Parliament’s) ‘official’ website.
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: Previous Election Results & Number of MSP’s by Party (Combined Region & Constituency)
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.
Previous Election Results & Number of MSP’s by Party (Combined Region & Constituency) – This embedded spreadsheet shows the combined regional and constituency level results results of all Scottish General Elections in the Electoral Region for each party – number of votes & MSP’s elected – going back to the first in 1999, coloured by political party. It provides ‘at a glance’ contextual political knowledge. The results shown in the table are a combination of the results in the Regional and Constituency Summary seed branches.
Note(s)
i) An explanation of the voting system for the Scottish Parliament – which is a dual vote system of ‘first past the post’ constituencies and proportional representation in electoral regions – can be found on Wikipedia here.
ii) The recommendations of the first review of Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region & Consituency boundaries were enacted in time for the 2011 Scottish General Election so it may not be comparing like with like for earlier results.
Index Marker Tags & Goups: Various
A variety of Index Markers arranged into groups are used throughout the map to tag branches with contextual knowledge 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 branch 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 – Scottish Parliament Region –Each Scottish Parliament Electoral Region SUMMARY seed branch is tagged with it’s own index marker, created from the branch text itself. Thus there are 2 ‘parts’ to the marker tag – Region name (ONS Code) eg. Highlands and Islands (S17000011).
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…
SCOT PARL REGN – Shared Land Borders – This Marker Group indicates which other Scottish Parliament Electoral Region(s) that the selected region shares a mutual land border with, as shown on the Ordnance Survey Election Map online viewer.
On mainland Scotland electoral area 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.
SCOT PARL REGN – ONS Code – The Region’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.
SCOT PARL REGN – Scot Parl Cons – All the Scottish Parliament Constituencies that are located within the Electoral Region. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Constituency Name (ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute (S16000083).
Note(s)
i) Because of the way the dual electoral system works, Constituencies are only ever part of one Electoral Region.
SCOT PARL REGN – Scottish LCs – All the Scottish local council areas that overlap with the Scottish Parliament Region. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Council Name (ISO3166-2 Code – ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute Council (GB-AGB – S12000035)
SCOT PARL REGN – SLC Wards – All the Local Council Electoral Wards that overlap with the Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region. As is usually the case in Scottish electoral geography, whilst many Local Councils are wholy within the one Scottish Parlaimentary Region and even Constituency, it is not always the case, and sometimetimes even Local Council Electoral Wards are split between them. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Local Council Electoral ward Name (LGBCS Ward Number – ISO3166-2 Code – ONS Code) eg. Cowal (Ward 6 – GB-AGB – S13002521).
SCOT PARL REGN – UK Parl Cons – All the UK Parliament Constituencies that overlap with the Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – UK Parliament Constituency Name (ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute (S14000083).
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Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region ‘Region As A Whole’ Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
General Knowledge Resource Links Geographic Knowledge Resource Links Electoral Knowledge Resource Links
One of our philosophies at KnowledgeMappers is not to reinvent the wheel whenever possible. Thus we include hyperlinks to original official / definitive / plain old useful knowledge sources whenever possible, as well as links to Wikipedia pages for additional, “bigger picture” context (often not obvious, or even absent from, the original source). By doing this…
- original sources get used more often, by more people.
- errors get spotted quicker, thereby improving the information quality for everybody.
- updates get promulgated sooner to end users.
- rather than us having to interpret original sources to create further information resources around “big picture” context for a subject we are not experts in, users of our map can “get it straight from the horses mouth” as it were, so everybody benefits.
Note(s)
i) MindManager has the unique ability to have multiple hyperlinks attached to a single map branch, and to edit the default title text of the link to make it more meaningful to the user. This…
- greatly reduces the visual clutter of the map.
- means a full basket of links to official / definitive / useful knowledge resources about the subject can stay with the seed branch if it is re-used in other maps.
The chain icon at the end of a branch (rather than the favicon (icon) served by the linked-to website) indicates where a branch has more than one hyperlink.
ii) In the circular knowledge economy way of Wikipedia if there is knowledge that you could add to an existing page that is linked to, or even starting a page that doesn’t yet exist, then go for it! That’s what it’s all about!
iii) Not all of the resources below will exist for all constituencies.
The following knowledge resource links are attached to this seed branch (arranged in alphabetical order within the groupings)…
General Knowledge Resource Links
Wikipedia – Article on the Scottish Parliament Electoral Region – As well as the full history of elections and elected members for the region, the Wikipedia consituency article includes the general history. This is especially useful flagging up material changes to consituency boundaries over the years.
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Geographic Knowledge Resource Links
Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland – First Review Region Map [PDF & online viewer] – The LGBCS helpfully publish GIS produced, region and constituency boundary maps in PDF (i.e. static) format as part of their periodic review process. The maps show the boundaries against an Ordnance Survey basemap, and can be easily printed if required.
Current boundaries were enacted at the 2011 election after the first review in 2010.
Note(s)
i) The Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland took over responsibility for reviewing Scottish Parliament Electoral Region and Constituency boundaries from the Boundary Commission for Scotland in 2017. As part of the impending Scottish Elections (Reform) Act 2020, it’s name will be changed to Boundaries Scotland.
Ordnance Survey Election Maps Viewer – This online map viewer has been created by Ordnance Survey as part of their duties to create and maintain detailed maps of all electoral areas in Great Britain.
Note(s)
i) It is not possible to link to individual map views in the viewer, so users will have to manually ‘switch on’ the ‘Scottish Parliament Electoral Regions’ and/or ‘Scottish Parliament Constituencies’ layers from the selection panel on the left side of the window.
ii) Ordnance Survey’s BoundaryLine GIS dataset is freely available to download as part of OS Open Data.
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Electoral Knowledge Resource Links
BBC News Election Results – Region – The BBC News website has the last (2016) Scottish General Election results at national and individual constituency level (with a small amount of consistuency profile information).
Who Can I Vote For? by Democracy Club – Constituency Elections – This is a ‘newly discovered by us’ website that not only lists all UK local and national elections and by-elections since 2016 (as well as the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections), but also has crowd-sourced details about all the candidates standing in each and every constituency or ward (eg. links to their official websites and social media as well as previous elections they may have stood in that they have details of). For Scottish Parliament Electoral Regions there is a single link to the 2016 General Election page showing the candidates standing listed under their parties, with a flag next to those that were elected (as regional candidates it’s not as straightforward as just showing the number of votes they received). Note there will be also be a page for the impending 2021 Scottish General Election in due course.
Note(s)
i) The Democracy Club community interest company and associated volunteers are to be congratulated for the ‘Herculean’ efforts in creating this comprehensive, publicly accessible and free to use knowledge resource about all elections in the UK, and we do not envy them their task! The Who Can I Vote For? website is a constant work in progress so we’re sure it will change in the future, but as it stands right now, from our ‘knowledge mapping of links’ point of view, we have a few observations…
Elections
- There is one ‘All Elections’ page that, as the title suggests, lists all the UK elections covered by the site…
- European Parliament
- London Assembly
- Local Council
- Mayoral
- Police and Crime Commissioner
- Northern Ireland Assembly
- Referendum
- Scottish Parliament
- Senedd Cymru
- UK Parliament
- These are listed first by calendar date of occurence (in reverse order), and then alphabetically within that date group. So there is not a single page for a particular Constituency (or any other electoral area covered) that lists the links to all the elections that have happened there, including subsequent by-elections 🙁 .
- As can be imagined from the list of type of elections covered above, there is a lot to scroll through to find what you want (there is no search or filtering feature). So you really have to know the date when the election you are interested in happened in order to find it on the page before you can start drilling down. That said all the Scottish Local Council general elections take place on the same day (the first thursday in May), which helps (the same is not true for by-elections obviously).
- Elections in individual constituencies are not listed on this page, instead it will say ‘Scottish Parliament elections or by-election’. Clicking on that link will take you to an ‘index page’ where the individual constituencies in which an election has occured on that date (obviously all of them in a General Election) are listed in alphabetical order, and you then click on that link to get to the actual election page where the candidate listing is.
- After the election, the constituency page of all the candidates is updated to list the number of votes for each candidate as well as indicating which one was successfully elected. However there is no other data on the election itself – the total electorate, turnout etc. – which means that this is not an ‘everything you want to know about the election in the constituency all conveniently gathered into the one place’ knowledge resource (in the same way the election listing on Wikipedia only shows the results with no information about the candidates other than their party as the vast majority of them will not have a Wikpedia page that can be linked to).
- No unique identifying codes are used for the electoral units anywhere on the site and so units they are only identified by name.
Candidates / Elected representatives
- The contents of an individual candidate / elected representative’s page is entirely dependent on what’s been added by local volunteers and so it varies a lot – from ‘no further information on this person’ (including no profile picture), to all their social media accounts.
- It also relates to the last election they stood in, which could be in a different political ‘arena’. For example it is not uncommon for local councillors to stand for election as a member of the UK or Scottish Parliaments.
- A far as an individual’s election history section goes this is entirely dependent on what’s in the database. Thus if they stood for election before 2016, unless it was at the 2010 or 2015 UK General Elections, this section will be blank.
Wikipedia – Election results subsection of Scottish Parliament Region Article – As noted in the General Links section above, the Wikipedia article on the constituency has the history of elections and elected members for the constituency.
Note(s)
i) As a crowd-sourced resource the quality, breadth and depth of the content of Wikipedia articles is entirely reliant on volunteers, who are able to source (and link to) reliable information found elsewhere in the public domain. In our experience it may be the case that…
- not all election results may be reported for every constituency.
- even if there is a long history of results, there may actually have been intervening boundary changes so the constituency is not exactly the same over time, even though it’s called the same name. These are not always picked up by Wikipedia contributors.
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region 'Regional Level Only' Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region ‘Regional Level Only’ Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Image Text Note Spreadsheet Table 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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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 ‘jigery 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’ Electoral Region Location Map – The double thumbnail ‘boundaries only’ map (which has been created by us) shows the location of the electoral region within Scotland on the left, with a close up map of just the region on the right.
Note(s)
i) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.
ii) Due to the disparate nature of the geographic extent of equivelant administrative and electoral areas in Scotland, their locations are not always immediately obvious from the map for the smallest ones. If you zoom in on-screen, all should become clear though!
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Text: Title & Name
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters 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 administrative / electoral area / body and easy cross-referencing with other data sources, especially GIS databases (though it’s still not without it’s contradictions – see below!).
Title – Regional List Results & Current MSPs.
Region Name – Given the number of branches in our maps, the screen space can fill up quite quickly as users drill down the hierarchy and expand their content. Thus we usually repeat the Electoral Region name wherever expedient so users can more easily keep track of what they’re looking at.
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Note: MSP Changelog
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.
MSP Changelog – With 2 different electoral systems in play, the political changes we hope to record in this note will come about in different ways…
- Regional Level – There are no ‘regional by-elections’. If a Regional List MSP dies in office or resigns, than in theory the next available un-elected candidate on the party’s regional list will take over (though see note below). However if the individual concerned has moved on in life and no longer ‘wants the gig’ (especially if this is happening a long time after the election), the party will work it’s way down it’s list until they find a former candidate that does fancy giving it a go.
- Constituency Level – If a Constituency MSP dies in office or resigns, then that will trigger a by-election (though see note below).
Note(s)
i) Constituency By-elections or changes in the regional MSPs in the Scottish Parliament are relatively infrequent. Even if an MSP is successfully elected to the UK Parliament at a UK General Election, they are not obliged to resign as an MSP and so a by-election is not automatic.
ii) As with mapping Local Councillors, it has proved impossible to find ‘official’ sources of information about changes to the political circumstances in Regions, Constituencies and / or MSPs in the institution’s (ie. the Scottish Parliament’s) ‘official’ website.
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: Previous Regional Election Results & Number of Regional MSP’s 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.
Previous Regional Election Results & Number of Regional MSP’s by Party – This embedded spreadsheet shows results of all Scottish General Elections in the Electoral Region for each party – number of votes & MSP’s elected – going back to the first in 1999, coloured by political party. It provides ‘at a glance’ contextual political knowledge. The results are taken from the Wikipedia article for the Electoral Region, 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) An explanation of the voting system for the Scottish Parliament – which is a dual vote system of ‘first past the post’ constituencies and proportional representation in electoral regions – can be found on Wikipedia here.
ii) The recommendations of the first review of Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region & Consituency boundaries were enacted in time for the 2011 Scottish General Election so it may not be comparing like with like for earlier results.
iii) Just because we could we also counted the number of different political parties that were fielding candidates in the region at each election as a measure of ‘bio-diversity’ in the political eco system. Many of these parties will not have fielded any candidates in constituencies due to the cost and high threshold of the ‘first past the post’ electoral system that operates there.
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Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region ‘Region Level Only’ Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
The multiple hyperlinks attached to this summary branch are the same as attached to the those ‘Scottish Parliament Electoral Region ‘Region As A Whole’ Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch’ (see above). They are repeated here for map user convenience 🙂
Scottish Parliament Regional ('List') Elected Member (MSP) Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Scottish Parliament Elected Member (MSP) Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Fill Colour Image Text Note 
Embedded Data Fields 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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Fill Colour: Political Affiliation
The colour of the branch indicates the MSP’s political party affiliation, or as an ‘independent’.
Note(s)
i) Assignment of fill colour to elected representative seed branches is controlled by MindManager’s unique Smart Rule feature using the ‘MSP – Political Affiliation (Current)’ tag.
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Image: Official profile picture
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 ‘jigery 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.
Note(s)
i) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.
Profile Picture – This is much reduced resolution version of the official picture on the MSP’s page on the Parliament website.
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Text: Name, Political Party Affiliation and Constituency & Region Represented
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters 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.
Name – This is the name as given on their MSP’s page on the Parliament website. Names are suffixed with the term ‘MSP’ at the end so that the reason why they are listed is unequivocal…
Note(s)
i) If the MSP’s name is listed as ‘Sandy’ rather than ‘Alexander’, then that’s what their called in this map.
ii) Some MSP’s have a range of civic, business and political profiles, potentially at both local & national levels, so it is helpful to know ‘which hat they are wearing’ :-). For example a recently elected MSP may still be a serving Local Councillor.
(Party Affiliation) – Designation of party affiliation is as per the branch fill colour.
[REASON FOR DEPARTURE] – If this is present on the MP branch, it indicates the reason why they are now no longer a serving MSP despite being elected at the last election. Possible reasons are…
- [DECEASED] – MSP has died
- [RESIGNED] – MSP has resigned
- [REFUSED TO TAKE OFFICE] – candidate was successfully elected, but declined to take up their position
Whatever the reason, this will instigate a by-election at which the MSP’s replacement is elected.
Note(s)
i) There will usually be a delay before a by-election date is set and announced.
ii) Once the by-election has taken place, the ex-MSP’s topic will become a subtopic of the replacement MSP (though the hyperlink will probably no longer work as the Parliament usually remove the MSP’s profile webpage as soon as their ‘departure’ has been made public).
iii) The reason for departure is expanded upon in the topic note.
iv) The reason for departure is also denoted by a topic index marker (see below).
Constituency & Region – Although this repeats information from ‘higher up’ the map hierarchy, it is helps users keep track of ‘who is who’ when many map branches are expanded and filling the screen.
Note(s)
i) *An asterisk after the name indicates noteworthy MSP circumstances…
- they are now no longer a MSP. The reasons why will also be shown in [SQUARE BRACKETS]
- they were elected at a by-election.
- they have changed their political affiliation since being elected. Usually they will have ‘resigned their party whip’, voluntarily or otherwise, temporarily or permanently, for whatever reason. They may now sit as an ‘independent’, or they may have changed political party completely.
ii) There is also a brief topic note describing the change of circumstances more fully. This is generally taken from the Wikipedia article on the last election.
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Note: MSP Political Events 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.
MSP Political Events Log – If there have been any events that have caused a change in the MSP’s political circumstances, then they will be noted here (subject to the caveats in the notes below). So such things as (in increasing potential size of political ‘fall-out’)…
- their suspension of by their party or the council itself, preventing them from participating in normal council democratic processes.
- a change of allegiance – they may resign from their party and sit as an independent, or even “cross the floor” and join another party.
- their resignation / death, triggering a by-election (usually in a few weeks), that may or may not be won by another party!
Note(s)
i) 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 MSPs in the institution’s (ie. the Scottish Parliament’s) ‘official’ website, especially the ‘old’ version.
ii) 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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Embedded Data Fields: MSP’s Results to date for each successful election to the Scottish Parliament
Single data fields embedded in the seed branch are another unique MindManager feature. They provide quick reference of ‘core’ data that provides context and enables meaningful comparison with other MPs, saving the user the time and effort of looking them up in the linked knowledge resources. These are taken from official sources if easily accessible in the public domain, or Wikipedia if not.
Note(s)
i) The Data Fields can be hidden / shown by clicking the green toggle arrow just above the top right corner.
ii) Data Fields are like single cells in spreadsheets..
- The data can be numeric or text.
- The values in cells can be calculated from other cells either in the same branch or in other branches. Formulas that define the values are built using MindManager’s ‘Autocalc’ feature (again unique).
- The values in data fields may be used to control aspects of the visual formatting (eg. colour or shape) of the seed branch using Mindmanager’s ‘Smart Rules’ feature (again unique).
MSP’s Electoral Victory History to the Scottish Parliament – The Members of the Scottish Parliament are elected in 2 different systems running in parallel…
- 73 MSPs on ‘first past the post’ in 73 constituencies
- 56 MSPs by proportional representation ‘on the list’ – 7 from each of 8 electoral regions (comprising 8, 9 or 10 constituencies)
Once elected from either ‘Regional List’ or ‘Constituency’ MSP’s have equal status, but obviously because of the different systems we can’t record a successful election victory the same way for each one…
- Constituency Victory – This is recorded as the straightforward ‘first past the post’ majority for their party in the particular year e.g. ‘SNP Majority (2016) 5978’.
- ‘Regional List’ Victory – TThere are 2 aspects to record here – the order in which they were elected to one of the multiple (7, 8 or 9) available regional places, and their running order of selection on their parties list of regional candidates in [brackets] eg. ‘SNP Regional List (2007) 2 [2]’ – at the 2007 election they were were elected to the 2nd spot in the regional list, and they were 2nd on their parties regional candidates list.
All the previous electoral victories for the MSP that we have been able to find are recorded so it is possible to get a complete contextual picture of their experience. Details of each victory will be found in the multiple knowledge resources linked to in the branch.
Note(s)
i) MSPs running for election in constituencies often (but not always) run for election on the regional list for their party too, but this ill depend on internal party policy. If successfully elected to the constituency and they have been successfully elected to the regional list, they will take the more secure manadate (no guarantee they’ll make ‘the list’ next time round let alone be elected), their place on the list is taken by the ‘next’ candidate in their parties running order. If they fail to be elected for the constituency they may still be elected on the list depending on their parties vote and if they have a high enough ranking on it by their party. If they fail to get elected at either they may stand again in future elections.
ii) Constituency majorities may not be consecutive as MSP’s might lose their seat at one election and be re-elected at the next (if they have the tanacity!).
iii) There may be fewer majorities recorded for the MSP than recent election victories for their party (as given in the embedded results table in the Constituency Seed Branch) as previously incumbent MSPs have not sought re-election. Some MSP’s may also have represented other constituencies in the past.
iv) There’s a mixed bag of electoral victory histories for long serving MSP’s recorded on the seed branch. Some have only ever been elected ‘on the regional list’, whilst others start off as a successful regional list candidate and then get elected to a constituency (which may or may not be in the same region). Perhaps also ending up back as a ‘list MSP’ if they loste in the constituency again.
v) Should a list MSP resign for whatever reason during the course of the parliamentary term – perhaps they got elected at a constituency by-election, or to the UK Parliament (which has a different electoral cycle) – then in theory their place will be taken by the next candidate on their parties list from the last election without the need for another election event. However if that person is no longer is available, or still wishes, to serve as an MSP the party will work its way down the list in order until they find a previous candidate that still wants the job ;-).
vi) An explanation of the voting system for the Scottish Parliament – which is a dual vote system of ‘first past the post’ constituencies and proportional representation in electoral regions – can be found on Wikipedia here.
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.
MSP – Type – Tags whether the MSP is currently elected to a ‘Constituency’ or ‘Regional List.
MSP – Gender – This is not recorded on MSP’s listings (for obvious reasons), so we have assigned this attribute manually ourselves. Thus any errors are ours, for which we apologise in advance ;-).
MSP – Political Affliliation (Elected) – As per the embedded election results table.
MSP – Political Affliliation (Current) – What they’re affiliation is now (as far as we know). Obviously this need not be same as when they were elected, however hte incidences of whene they differ are far rarer at level of national electoral politics than local.
MSP – Electoral History – Given that we are going to record MSPs over time in subsequent maps, and there may be a time lag between an MSP resigning and their replacement being elected at a by-election, there is an obvious need to keep track of the status of individual mebers. Possible tags….
- Elected at YYYY Scottish General Election (Constituency or Regional List) – All General Elections (a tage for each) in which the MSP has been elected (note this may not necessarily be for the same constituency or regional list)
- Elected post-YYYY (Constituency or Regional List)* – If the MSP was elected at a subsequent by-election.
MSP – Active Status – This tag indicates any change in circumstances since the MSP was last elected to the constituency.
- Still serving as elected – MSP still serving under the same party whip as last elected
- No longer under elected party whip – MSP no longer serving under the same party whip as last
- DECEASED – MSP has died
- RESIGNED – MSP has resigned
- REFUSED TO TAKE OFFICE – Candidate was successfully elected, but declined to take up their position
Note(s)
i) For any status that isn’t ‘Still serving as elected’, it will be expanded upon in the topic note.
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Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.
Scottish Parliament Elected Member (MSP) Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Official Parliamentary Knowledge Resources 
Official Party / MSP Controlled Knowledge Resources 
Externally Controlled Knowledge Resources
One of our philosophies at KnowledgeMappers is not to reinvent the wheel whenever possible. Thus we include hyperlinks to original official / definitive / plain old useful knowledge sources whenever possible, as well as links to Wikipedia pages for additional, “bigger picture” context (often not obvious, or even absent from, the original source). By doing this…
- original sources get used more often, by more people.
- errors get spotted quicker, thereby improving the information quality for everybody.
- updates get promulgated sooner to end users.
- rather than us having to interpret original sources to create further information resources around “big picture” context for a subject we are not experts in, users of our map can “get it straight from the horses mouth” as it were, so everybody benefits.
Note(s)
i) MindManager has the unique ability to have multiple hyperlinks attached to a single map branch, and to edit the default title text of the link to make it more meaningful to the user. This…
- greatly reduces the visual clutter of the map.
- means a full basket of links to official / definitive / useful knowledge resources about the subject can stay with the seed branch if it is re-used in other maps.
The chain icon at the end of a branch (rather than the favicon (icon) served by the linked-to website) indicates where a branch has more than one hyperlink.
ii) In the circular knowledge economy way of Wikipedia if there is knowledge that you could add to an existing page that is linked to, or even starting a page that doesn’t yet exist, then go for it! That’s what it’s all about!
iii) Not all of the resources below will exist for all MSPs.
The following knowledge resource links are attached to this seed branch (arranged in alphabetical order within the groupings)…
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Official Parliamentary Knowledge Resources
An elected representative is obliged to submit information to the institution authorities, who then publish it in the public domain on the institution website(s) as required, so this collection of knowledge resources is not under the control of the elected representative.
However how this member information is published and how the various strands are interconnected when presented to the user so they don’t have to go hunting for them on the website (or even websites plural), varies a lot between political institutions like parliaments and councils. There has been an improvement over the years but there’s still a ways to go.
Information that should be easily finable by the user are…
- contact details, including an e-mail address
- register of interests
- membership of official committes
- contributions to debates etc.
Note(s)
i) Institutions overhaul / revamp / upgrade / move stuff around on (or even completely replace) websites on an annoyingly frequent basis (usually just as we’re about to finish a map :-(. If the map links to specific pages / resources no longer work, and you can’t work out where it is from the menus in the new setup, then use the search bar!
ii) Moden web architecture allows the content of a ‘page’ to change interactively by user selection without this changing the URL (the web address in the browser bar) e.g. ‘tabs’ with different content. Thus…
- it is often not possible to link to specific resources because they are contained within the page e.g. register of interests.
- when you ‘arrive’ at the url you may still have to hunt around the page looking for the resource you want (e.g. click on a tab, unfold a section etc.)
Scottish Parliament MSP Profile – The Scottish Parliament has changed thier website since it first launched and MSP profile pages no longer contain any personal biography information about them (they used to do a wee introductory video about themselves), however there is improved interlinking across the different areas of the MSPs parlaimentary activitiy.
‘Tabbed’ subsections are…
- Contact details
- Committees
- Cross-party groups
- Parliamentary and Government Roles
- Party Roles
- Previous Roles
- Register of interests
And Recent Acctivity
- What was said
- Votes
- Motions
- Written questions
Contact Details – How to contact the MSP at the Scottish Parlaiment. It may also include constituency office contact details.
Email MP @parliament.scot – This is the official e-mail address of the MSP at the Scottish Parliament. Other contact details, are given on the MSPs official parliamentary profile page.
Register of Interests – The ‘Register of Interests’ provides details about MSPs’ financial interests and benefits. Anything that could be perceived as influencing an MSP’s votes, words or actions should be included, such as…
- payment for work done outside of MSP duties
- property and land ownership
- gifts
- overseas visits (related to work)
All MSPs are legally required to provide these details. The Register of Interests is publicly available and updated every time there is a change. MSPs must register any changes within 30 days. You can see each MSP’s register of interests on their page.
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Official Party / MP Controlled Knowledge Resources
This collection of knowledge resources is directly controlled by the MSP, or their political party, and consists of websites and social media accounts. As is the case with the ‘real world’, some MSPs have a bigger / more active ‘online presence’ than others…
Official Party MSP Profile – Most political parties provide a profile page of their MSP’s on their main website. They are usually fairly minimal in content. They may have some personal biography information, but at the very least will have contact details for the MSP and their local party association. Sometimes this is the only ‘official’ website an MSP has.
MSP’s Official Website – This is the MSP’s own wesbite and so is presumably under their control. That said some are better than others (or even absent completely), and are more personalised than ‘corporate template’. They usually provide details of how to get in touch with the MSP and local surgeries for constituents.
Facebook – MSP’s Facebook page if they have one. Many, but by no means all, do.
Twitter – MSP’s Twitter feed if they have one. Many, but by no means all, do, or still have (it’s not as if politicians could get vilified for something that they had ‘tweeted’ in the past or anything like that…).
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Externally Controlled Knowledge Resources
This collection of knowledge resources is published by external, and therefore ‘unofficial’, parties. With the sophisticated level of web technology available now, some combine and repackage knowledge from official parliamentary sources on the one ‘page’ as a service to consitiuents so they can get the full picture of what their MSP is actually doing in parliament. And then there’s good old Wikipedia, which is amazingly ‘current’ on UK politics.
The Public Whip Voting Record – A not for profit, open source project that ‘scrapes’ the flat text of the parliament Hansard (daily transcription of what is said) and turns it into a useful online database of meaningful knowledge about how individual MSPs have voted on specific ‘divisions’.
TheyWorkForYou – Another not for profit project run by mySociety, that ‘scrapes’ a variety of online sources of MSPs activities in parliament and turns them into a useful online knowlegde base of not just how individual MSPs have voted on specific issues, but also some analysis and sharing tools.
Who Can I Vote For? by Democracy Club – This is a ‘newly discovered by us’ website that not only lists all UK local and national elections and by-elections since 2016 (as well as the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections), but also has crowd-sourced details about all the candidates standing in each and every constituency or ward (eg. links to their official websites and social media as well as previous elections they may have stood in that they have details of). This particular link is to a page for the MSP as an individual candidate / elected representative, with links to their own websites & social media (if known), and their electoral history as a candidate in all UK elections going back to 2016, plus the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections (again if known).
Note(s)
i) The Democracy Club community interest company and associated volunteers are to be congratulated for the ‘Herculean’ efforts in creating this comprehensive, publicly accessible and free to use knowledge resource about all elections in the UK, and we do not envy them their task! The Who Can I Vote For? website is a constant work in progress so we’re sure it will change in the future, but as it stands right now, from our ‘knowledge mapping of links’ point of view, we have a few observations…
Elections
- There is one ‘All Elections’ page that, as the title suggests, lists all the UK elections covered by the site…
- European Parliament
- London Assembly
- Local Council
- Mayoral
- Police and Crime Commissioner
- Northern Ireland Assembly
- Referendum
- Scottish Parliament
- Senedd Cymru
- UK Parliament
- These are listed first by calendar date of occurence (in reverse order), and then alphabetically within that date group. So there is not a single page for a particular Constituency (or any other electoral area covered) that lists the links to all the elections that have happened there, including subsequent by-elections 🙁 .
- As can be imagined from the list of type of elections covered above, there is a lot to scroll through to find what you want (there is no search or filtering feature). So you really have to know the date when the election you are interested in happened in order to find it on the page before you can start drilling down. That said all the Scottish Local Council general elections take place on the same day (the first thursday in May), which helps (the same is not true for by-elections obviously).
- Elections in individual constituencies are not listed on this page, instead it will say ‘Scottish Parliament elections or by-election’. Clicking on that link will take you to an ‘index page’ where the individual constituencies in which an election has occured on that date (obviously all of them in a General Election) are listed in alphabetical order, and you then click on that link to get to the actual election page where the candidate listing is.
- After the election, the constituency page of all the candidates is updated to list the number of votes for each candidate as well as indicating which one was successfully elected. However there is no other data on the election itself – the total electorate, turnout etc. – which means that this is not an ‘everything you want to know about the election in the constituency all conveniently gathered into the one place’ knowledge resource (in the same way the election listing on Wikipedia only shows the results with no information about the candidates other than their party as the vast majority of them will not have a Wikpedia page that can be linked to).
- No unique identifying codes are used for the electoral units anywhere on the site and so units they are only identified by name.
Candidates / Elected representatives
- The contents of an individual candidate / elected representative’s page is entirely dependent on what’s been added by local volunteers and so it varies a lot – from ‘no further information on this person’ (including no profile picture), to all their social media accounts.
- It also relates to the last election they stood in, which could be in a different political ‘arena’. For example it is not uncommon for local councillors to stand for election as a member of the UK or Scottish Parliaments.
- A far as an individual’s election history section goes this is entirely dependent on what’s in the database. Thus if they stood for election before 2016, unless it was at the 2010 or 2015 UK General Elections, this section will be blank.
Wikipedia – Article on MSP (if available) – There is a Wikipedia article on just about all MSP’s, though the amount and quality of the content does vary. Usually it contains a bit more personal biographical information than is available from ‘official’ sources.
Note(s)
i) As with all Wikipedia links…
- If you know something that’s not there, get involved and add your contribution to the article so everybody can benefit from your knowledge.
- The external Links’ section at the bottom of the articles provides a great ‘jumping off point’ to discover new knowledge resources.
Scottish Parliament Electoral Region 'Constituency Level Only' Summary Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Scottish Parliament CONSTITUENCY REGIONAL SUMMARY Results Knowledge Seed Branch
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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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 ‘jigery 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’ Electoral Region Location Map – The double thumbnail ‘boundaries only’ map (which has been created by us) shows the location of the electoral region within Scotland on the left, with a close up map of just the region showing the constituency boundaries on the right.
Note(s)
i) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.
ii) Due to the disparate nature of the geographic extent of equivelant administrative and electoral areas in Scotland, their locations are not always immediately obvious from the map for the smallest ones. If you zoom in on-screen, all should become clear though!
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Text: Title & Name
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters 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 administrative / electoral area / body and easy cross-referencing with other data sources, especially GIS databases (though it’s still not without it’s contradictions – see below!).
Title – Individual Constituency Results & Current MSPs.
Region Name – Given the number of branches in our maps, the screen space can fill up quite quickly as users drill down the hierarchy and expand their content. Thus we usually repeat the Electoral Region name wherever expedient so users can more easily keep track of what they’re looking at.
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Note: MSP Changelog
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.
MSP Changelog – With 2 different electoral systems in play, the political changes we hope to record in this note will come about in different ways…
- Regional Level – There are no ‘regional by-elections’. If a Regional List MSP dies in office or resigns, than in theory the next available un-elected candidate on the party’s regional list will take over (though see note below). However if the individual concerned has moved on in life and no longer ‘wants the gig’ (especially if this is happening a long time after the election), the party will work it’s way down it’s list until they find a former candidate that does fancy giving it a go.
- Constituency Level – If a Constituency MSP dies in office or resigns, then that will trigger a by-election (though see note below).
Note(s)
i) Constituency By-elections or changes in the regional MSPs in the Scottish Parliament are relatively infrequent. Even if an MSP is successfully elected to the UK Parliament at a UK General Election, they are not obliged to resign as an MSP and so a by-election is not automatic.
ii) As with mapping Local Councillors, it has proved impossible to find ‘official’ sources of information about changes to the political circumstances in Regions, Constituencies and / or MSPs in the institution’s (ie. the Scottish Parliament’s) ‘official’ website.
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: Previous Combined Constituency Results & Number of Constituency MSP’s 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.
Previous Combined Constituency Results & Number of Constituency MSP’s by Party – This embedded spreadsheet shows the combined results of all Scottish General Elections in all the Constituencies in the Electoral Region for each party – number of votes & MSP’s elected – going back to the first in 1999, coloured by political party. It provides ‘at a glance’ contextual political knowledge. The results are taken from the Wikipedia article for the Electoral Region, 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) An explanation of the voting system for the Scottish Parliament – which is a dual vote system of ‘first past the post’ constituencies and proportional representation in electoral regions – can be found on Wikipedia here.
ii) The recommendations of the first review of Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region & Consituency boundaries were enacted in time for the 2011 Scottish General Election so it may not be comparing like with like for earlier results.
iii) Just because we could we also counted the number of different political parties that were fielding candidates in the region at each election as a measure of ‘bio-diversity’ in the political eco system. Many of these parties will not have fielded any candidates in constituencies due to the cost and high threshold of the ‘first past the post’ electoral system that operates there.
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Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.
Scottish Parliament CONSTITUENCY REGIONAL SUMMARY Results Knowledge Seed Branch
Internal Links
These are links to other branches in the map (i.e. ‘internal’ as opposed to ‘external’ i.e. URLs’), for internal navigation purposes. When clicked, the map view will re-focus from the ‘jumpimg off’ to the ‘destination’ branch.
Note(s)
i) Not necessarily 2 way – The ‘destination branch’ at the other end of the internal link may not necessarily have a link back to the branch you jumped from.
The following internal links are attached to this seed branch…
Region’s Constituencies – There is an internal link to each Constituency seed branch within the region.
Scottish Parliament Individual Constituency Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Scottish Parliament Constituency Political Knowledge Seed Branch
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 ‘SCOT PARL CONS – Borders Types’ tag (eqivelant to thematic mapping in GIS).
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Fill Colour: Political Affiliation
The colour of the constituency branch indicates the current MSP’s political party affiliation, 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 ‘SCOT 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’ Consituency Location Map –
The double thumbnail map (which has been created by us) provides locational context…
- thumbnail map of Scotland on the left with boundaries of electoral regions, with the selected electoral region coloured in red.
- thumbnail map of just the region with boundaries of each constituency on the right, with the selected constituency coloured in red.
Note(s)
i) This map image is also used for the region seed branch.
ii) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.
iii) Due to the disparate nature of the geographic extent of equivelant administrative and electoral areas in Scotland, their locations are not always immediately obvious from the map for the smallest ones. If you zoom in on-screen, all should 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 chatracters 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 administrative / electoral areas and easy cross-referencing with other data sources, especially GIS databases (though it’s still not without it’s contradictions).
Costituency Name – We have taken the names of the Constituency from the parliament website.
ONS Code – The UK Government Office for National Statistics and 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
Region Name & Parliament – Given the number of branches in our maps, the screen space can fill up quite quickly as users drill down the hierarchy and expand their content. Thus we often repeat contextual information from ‘higher up’ the map – in this case the Electoral Region name and the fact that it’s a constituency in the Scottish Parlaiment – wherever expedient so users can more easily keep track of what they’re looking at.
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Note: Changelog
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.
Changelog – With 2 different electoral systems in play, the political changes we hope to record in this note will come about in different ways…
- Regional Level – There are no ‘regional by-elections’. If a Regional List MSP dies in office or resigns, than in theory the next available un-elected candidate on the party’s regional list will take over (though see note below). However if the individual concerned has moved on in life and no longer ‘wants the gig’ (especially if this is happening a long time after the election), the party will work it’s way down it’s list until they find a former candidate that does fancy giving it a go.
- Constituency Level – If a Constituency MSP dies in office or resigns, then that will trigger a by-election (though see note below).
Note(s)
i) Constituency By-elections or changes in the regional MSPs in the Scottish Parliament are relatively infrequent. Even if an MSP is successfully elected to the UK Parliament at a UK General Election, they are not obliged to resign as an MSP and so a by-election is not automatic.
ii) As with mapping Local Councillors, it has proved impossible to find ‘official’ sources of information about changes to the political circumstances in Regions, Constituencies and / or MSPs in the institution’s (ie. the Scottish Parliament’s) ‘official’ website.
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: Previous Constituency 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.
Previous Constituency Election Results (coloured by party) – This embedded spreadsheet table shows the results of all Scottish General Elections in the Constituency for each party – number of votes for each, winning majority & voter turnout – going back to the first in 1999, coloured by political party. 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) *An additional column marked with a year and an asterisk indicate a by-election.
ii) The recommendations of the first review of Scottish Parliamentary Electoral Region & Consituency boundaries were enacted in time for the 2011 Scottish General Election (as indicated by the vertical dark line in the table). Some boundaries were amended, whilst some constituencies were abolished completely and new ones created. Thus it is not always possible to compare all electoral results ‘like for like’ before and after this review.
iii) An explanation of the voting system for the Scottish Parliament – which is a dual vote system of ‘first past the post’ constituencies and proportional representation in electoral regions – can be found on Wikipedia here.
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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 with contextual knowledge 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 branch 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 – Scottish Parliament Constituency – Each Scottish Parliament Constituency seed branch is tagged with it’s own index marker, created from the branch text itself. Thus there are 2 ‘parts’ to the marker tag – Constituency name (ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute (S16000083).
POLITICAL MARKERS
‘Political’ index markers tag the branch with knowledge about the designation and current political representation of the constituency.
SCOT PARL CONS – Designation – Historically there were several diferent types of Paliamentary Constituency in the UK, 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”.
SCOT PARL CONS – Current Political Party – Designation of sitting MSP’s current party affiliation (tag is coloured as per the usual UK political party colours).
Note(s)
i) This can change even without a general or by- election so the current ‘political colour’ shown can be different to the one at the last election if the MSP has ‘lost the party whip’ and now sits as an independent, or even joined another party altogether!
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…
SCOT PARL CONS – Border 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)
SCOT PARL CONS – Shared Land Borders – This Marker Group indicates which other Scottish Parliament Constituency(s) that the selected constituency shares a mutual border with, as shown on the Ordnance Survey Election Map online viewer.
On mainland Scotland 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.
SCOT PARL CONS – ONS Code – The Constituenciy’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.
SCOT PARL CONS – Scot Parl Region – Scottish Parliamentary Consituencies are divided amongst regions, which also have elected members. The marker is in the form Electoral Region Name (ONS Code) eg. Highlands and Islands (S17000011).
SCOT PARL CONS – Scottish LCs – All the Scottish local council areas that overlap with the Scottish Parliament Constuency (there may be more than 1). There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – Council Name (ISO3166-2 Code – ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute Council (GB-AGB – S12000035).
SCOT PARL CONS – UK Parl Cons – All the UK Parliament Constituencies that overlap with the Scottish Parliamentary constituency. There are 2 ‘parts’ to this marker – UK Parliament Constituency Name (ONS Code) eg. Argyll and Bute (S14000083).
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Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.
Scottish Parliament Constituency Political Knowledge Seed Branch
One of our philosophies at KnowledgeMappers is not to reinvent the wheel whenever possible. Thus we include hyperlinks to original official / definitive / plain old useful knowledge sources whenever possible, as well as links to Wikipedia pages for additional, “bigger picture” context (often not obvious, or even absent from, the original source). By doing this…
- original sources get used more often, by more people.
- errors get spotted quicker, thereby improving the information quality for everybody.
- updates get promulgated sooner to end users.
- rather than us having to interpret original sources to create further information resources around “big picture” context for a subject we are not experts in, users of our map can “get it straight from the horses mouth” as it were, so everybody benefits.
Note(s)
i) MindManager has the unique ability to have multiple hyperlinks attached to a single map branch, and to edit the default title text of the link to make it more meaningful to the user. This…
- greatly reduces the visual clutter of the map.
- means a full basket of links to official / definitive / useful knowledge resources about the subject can stay with the seed branch if it is re-used in other maps.
The chain icon at the end of a branch (rather than the favicon (icon) served by the linked-to website) indicates where a branch has more than one hyperlink.
ii) In the circular knowledge economy way of Wikipedia if there is knowledge that you could add to an existing page that is linked to, or even starting a page that doesn’t yet exist, then go for it! That’s what it’s all about!
iii) Not all of the resources below will exist for all constituencies.
The following knowledge resource links are attached to this seed branch (arranged in alphabetical order within the groupings)…
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General Knowledge Resource Links
Scottish Parliament – Constituency Representation – We mention this here because it is concpicuous by it’s absence as the Scottish Parliament website no longer contains any information about constituencies or electoral regions, other than the MSPs elected to them. There at least used to be a map page.
Scottish Government Statistics Portal – Scottish Parliamentary Constituency – This is the link to the constituency’s data profile page in the ‘Scottish Parliamentary Constituencies’ section on the geostatistical atlas section of the statistics.gov.scot website. As well as key facts, the data about the Constituency is grouped as…
- Social Environment
- Crime and Justice
- Economic Activity, Benefits and Tax Credits
- Economy
- Education, Skills and Training
- Environment
- Geography
- Health and Social Care
- Housing
- Labour Force
- Population
- Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation
- Transport
Wikipedia – Article on the Scottish Parliament constituency – As well as the full history of elections and elected members for the constituency, the Wikipedia consituency article includes the general history. This is especially useful flagging up material changes to consituency boundaries over the years.
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Geographic Knowledge Resource Links
Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland – First Review Constituency Map [PDF & online viewer] – The LGBCS helpfully publish GIS produced, constituency boundary maps in PDF (i.e. static) format as part of their periodic review process. The maps show the boundaries against an Ordnance Survey basemap, and can be easily printed if required.
Current boundaries were enacted at the 2011 election after the first review in 2010.
Note(s)
i) The Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland took over responsibility for reviewing Scottish Parliament Electoral Region and Constituency boundaries from the Boundary Commission for Scotland in 2017. As part of the impending Scottish Elections (Reform) Act 2020, it’s name will be changed to Boundaries Scotland.
Ordnance Survey Election Maps Viewer – This online map viewer has been created by Ordnance Survey as part of their duties to create and maintain detailed maps of all electoral areas in Great Britain
Note(s)
i) It is not possible to link to individual map views in the viewer, so users will have to manually ‘switch on’ the ‘Scottish Parliament Electoral Regions’ and/or ‘Scottish Parliament Constituencies’ layers from the selection panel on the left side of the window.
ii) Ordnance Survey’s BoundaryLine GIS dataset is freely available to download as part of OS Open Data.
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Electoral Knowledge Resource Links
BBC News Election Results – Constituency – The BBC News website has the last (2016) Scottish General Election results at national and individual constituency level (with a small amount of consistuency profile information).
Who Can I Vote For? by Democracy Club – Constituency Elections – This is a ‘newly discovered by us’ website that not only lists all UK local and national elections and by-elections since 2016 (as well as the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections), but also has crowd-sourced details about all the candidates standing in each and every constituency or ward (eg. links to their official websites and social media as well as previous elections they may have stood in that they have details of). For Scottish Parliament constituencies there is a single link to the 2016 General Election showing the candidates and their votes in the individual constituency (there will be also be one for the impending 2021 Scottish General Election in due course).
Note(s)
i) The Democracy Club community interest company and associated volunteers are to be congratulated for the ‘Herculean’ efforts in creating this comprehensive, publicly accessible and free to use knowledge resource about all elections in the UK, and we do not envy them their task! The Who Can I Vote For? website is a constant work in progress so we’re sure it will change in the future, but as it stands right now, from our ‘knowledge mapping of links’ point of view, we have a few observations…
Elections
- There is one ‘All Elections’ page that, as the title suggests, lists all the UK elections covered by the site…
- European Parliament
- London Assembly
- Local Council
- Mayoral
- Police and Crime Commissioner
- Northern Ireland Assembly
- Referendum
- Scottish Parliament
- Senedd Cymru
- UK Parliament
- These are listed first by calendar date of occurence (in reverse order), and then alphabetically within that date group. So there is not a single page for a particular Constituency (or any other electoral area covered) that lists the links to all the elections that have happened there, including subsequent by-elections 🙁 .
- As can be imagined from the list of type of elections covered above, there is a lot to scroll through to find what you want (there is no search or filtering feature). So you really have to know the date when the election you are interested in happened in order to find it on the page before you can start drilling down. That said all the Scottish Local Council general elections take place on the same day (the first thursday in May), which helps (the same is not true for by-elections obviously).
- Elections in individual constituencies are not listed on this page, instead it will say ‘Scottish Parliament elections or by-election’. Clicking on that link will take you to an ‘index page’ where the individual constituencies in which an election has occured on that date (obviously all of them in a General Election) are listed in alphabetical order, and you then click on that link to get to the actual election page where the candidate listing is.
- After the election, the constituency page of all the candidates is updated to list the number of votes for each candidate as well as indicating which one was successfully elected. However there is no other data on the election itself – the total electorate, turnout etc. – which means that this is not an ‘everything you want to know about the election in the constituency all conveniently gathered into the one place’ knowledge resource (in the same way the election listing on Wikipedia only shows the results with no information about the candidates other than their party as the vast majority of them will not have a Wikpedia page that can be linked to).
- No unique identifying codes are used for the electoral units anywhere on the site and so units they are only identified by name.
Candidates / Elected representatives
- The contents of an individual candidate / elected representative’s page is entirely dependent on what’s been added by local volunteers and so it varies a lot – from ‘no further information on this person’ (including no profile picture), to all their social media accounts.
- It also relates to the last election they stood in, which could be in a different political ‘arena’. For example it is not uncommon for local councillors to stand for election as a member of the UK or Scottish Parliaments.
- A far as an individual’s election history section goes this is entirely dependent on what’s in the database. Thus if they stood for election before 2016, unless it was at the 2010 or 2015 UK General Elections, this section will be blank.
Wikipedia – Election results subsection of Scottish Parliament constituency Article – As noted in the General Links section above, the Wikipedia article on the constituency has the history of elections and elected members for the constituency.
Note(s)
i) As a crowd-sourced resource the quality, breadth and depth of the content of Wikipedia articles is entirely reliant on volunteers, who are able to source (and link to) reliable information found elsewhere in the public domain. In our experience it may be the case that…
- not all election results may be reported for every constituency.
- even if there is a long history of results, there may actually have been intervening boundary changes so the constituency is not exactly the same over time, even though it’s called the same name. These are not always picked up by Wikipedia contributors.
Scottish Parliament Constituency Elected Member (MSP) Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Scottish Parliament Elected Member (MSP) Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Fill Colour Image Text Note Embedded Data Fields 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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Fill Colour: Political Affiliation
The colour of the branch indicates the MSP’s political party affiliation, or as an ‘independent’.
Note(s)
i) Assignment of fill colour to elected representative seed branches is controlled by MindManager’s unique Smart Rule feature using the ‘MSP – Political Affiliation (Current)’ tag.
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Image: Official profile picture
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 ‘jigery 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.
Note(s)
i) All images are optimised to reduce the file size.
Profile Picture – This is much reduced resolution version of the official picture on the MSP’s page on the Parliament website.
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Text: Name, Political Party Affiliation and Constituency & Region Represented
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters 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.
Name – This is the name as given on their MSP’s page on the Parliament website. Names are suffixed with the term ‘MSP’ at the end so that the reason why they are listed is unequivocal…
Note(s)
i) If the MSP’s name is listed as ‘Sandy’ rather than ‘Alexander’, then that’s what their called in this map.
ii) Some MSP’s have a range of civic, business and political profiles, potentially at both local & national levels, so it is helpful to know ‘which hat they are wearing’ :-). For example a recently elected MSP may still be a serving Local Councillor.
(Party Affiliation) – Designation of party affiliation is as per the branch fill colour.
[REASON FOR DEPARTURE] – If this is present on the MP branch, it indicates the reason why they are now no longer a serving MSP despite being elected at the last election. Possible reasons are…
- [DECEASED] – MSP has died
- [RESIGNED] – MSP has resigned
- [REFUSED TO TAKE OFFICE] – candidate was successfully elected, but declined to take up their position
Whatever the reason, this will instigate a by-election at which the MSP’s replacement is elected.
Note(s)
i) There will usually be a delay before a by-election date is set and announced.
ii) Once the by-election has taken place, the ex-MSP’s topic will become a subtopic of the replacement MSP (though the hyperlink will probably no longer work as the Parliament usually remove the MSP’s profile webpage as soon as their ‘departure’ has been made public).
iii) The reason for departure is expanded upon in the topic note.
iv) The reason for departure is also denoted by a topic index marker (see below).
Constituency & Region – Although this repeats information from ‘higher up’ the map hierarchy, it is helps users keep track of ‘who is who’ when many map branches are expanded and filling the screen.
Note(s)
i) *An asterisk after the name indicates noteworthy MSP circumstances…
- they are now no longer a MSP. The reasons why will also be shown in [SQUARE BRACKETS]
- they were elected at a by-election.
- they have changed their political affiliation since being elected. Usually they will have ‘resigned their party whip’, voluntarily or otherwise, temporarily or permanently, for whatever reason. They may now sit as an ‘independent’, or they may have changed political party completely.
ii) There is also a brief topic note describing the change of circumstances more fully. This is generally taken from the Wikipedia article on the last election.
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Note: MSP Political Events 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.
MSP Political Events Log – If there have been any events that have caused a change in the MSP’s political circumstances, then they will be noted here (subject to the caveats in the notes below). So such things as (in increasing potential size of political ‘fall-out’)…
- their suspension of by their party or the council itself, preventing them from participating in normal council democratic processes.
- a change of allegiance – they may resign from their party and sit as an independent, or even “cross the floor” and join another party.
- their resignation / death, triggering a by-election (usually in a few weeks), that may or may not be won by another party!
Note(s)
i) 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 MSPs in the institution’s (ie. the Scottish Parliament’s) ‘official’ website, especially the ‘old’ version.
ii) 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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Embedded Data Fields: MSP’s Results to date for each successful election to the Scottish Parliament
Single data fields embedded in the seed branch are another unique MindManager feature. They provide quick reference of ‘core’ data that provides context and enables meaningful comparison with other MPs, saving the user the time and effort of looking them up in the linked knowledge resources. These are taken from official sources if easily accessible in the public domain, or Wikipedia if not.
Note(s)
i) The Data Fields can be hidden / shown by clicking the green toggle arrow just above the top right corner.
ii) Data Fields are like single cells in spreadsheets..
- The data can be numeric or text.
- The values in cells can be calculated from other cells either in the same branch or in other branches. Formulas that define the values are built using MindManager’s ‘Autocalc’ feature (again unique).
- The values in data fields may be used to control aspects of the visual formatting (eg. colour or shape) of the seed branch using Mindmanager’s ‘Smart Rules’ feature (again unique).
MSP’s Electoral Victory History to the Scottish Parliament – The Members of the Scottish Parliament are elected in 2 different systems running in parallel…
- 73 MSPs on ‘first past the post’ in 73 constituencies
- 56 MSPs by proportional representation ‘on the list’ – 7 from each of 8 electoral regions (comprising 8, 9 or 10 constituencies)
Once elected from either ‘Regional List’ or ‘Constituency’ MSP’s have equal status, but obviously because of the different systems we can’t record a successful election victory the same way for each one…
- Constituency Victory – This is recorded as the straightforward ‘first past the post’ majority for their party in the particular year e.g. ‘SNP Majority (2016) 5978’.
- ‘Regional List’ Victory – TThere are 2 aspects to record here – the order in which they were elected to one of the multiple (7, 8 or 9) available regional places, and their running order of selection on their parties list of regional candidates in [brackets] eg. ‘SNP Regional List (2007) 2 [2]’ – at the 2007 election they were were elected to the 2nd spot in the regional list, and they were 2nd on their parties regional candidates list.
All the previous electoral victories for the MSP that we have been able to find are recorded so it is possible to get a complete contextual picture of their experience. Details of each victory will be found in the multiple knowledge resources linked to in the branch.
Note(s)
i) MSPs running for election in constituencies often (but not always) run for election on the regional list for their party too, but this ill depend on internal party policy. If successfully elected to the constituency and they have been successfully elected to the regional list, they will take the more secure manadate (no guarantee they’ll make ‘the list’ next time round let alone be elected), their place on the list is taken by the ‘next’ candidate in their parties running order. If they fail to be elected for the constituency they may still be elected on the list depending on their parties vote and if they have a high enough ranking on it by their party. If they fail to get elected at either they may stand again in future elections.
ii) Constituency majorities may not be consecutive as MSP’s might lose their seat at one election and be re-elected at the next (if they have the tanacity!).
iii) There may be fewer majorities recorded for the MSP than recent election victories for their party (as given in the embedded results table in the Constituency Seed Branch) as previously incumbent MSPs have not sought re-election. Some MSP’s may also have represented other constituencies in the past.
iv) There’s a mixed bag of electoral victory histories for long serving MSP’s recorded on the seed branch. Some have only ever been elected ‘on the regional list’, whilst others start off as a successful regional list candidate and then get elected to a constituency (which may or may not be in the same region). Perhaps also ending up back as a ‘list MSP’ if they loste in the constituency again.
v) Should a list MSP resign for whatever reason during the course of the parliamentary term – perhaps they got elected at a constituency by-election, or to the UK Parliament (which has a different electoral cycle) – then in theory their place will be taken by the next candidate on their parties list from the last election without the need for another election event. However if that person is no longer is available, or still wishes, to serve as an MSP the party will work its way down the list in order until they find a previous candidate that still wants the job ;-).
vi) An explanation of the voting system for the Scottish Parliament – which is a dual vote system of ‘first past the post’ constituencies and proportional representation in electoral regions – can be found on Wikipedia here.
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.
MSP – Type – Tags whether the MSP is currently elected to a ‘Constituency’ or ‘Regional List.
MSP – Gender – This is not recorded on MSP’s listings (for obvious reasons), so we have assigned this attribute manually ourselves. Thus any errors are ours, for which we apologise in advance ;-).
MSP – Political Affliliation (Elected) – As per the embedded election results table.
MSP – Political Affliliation (Current) – What they’re affiliation is now (as far as we know). Obviously this need not be same as when they were elected, however hte incidences of whene they differ are far rarer at level of national electoral politics than local.
MSP – Electoral History – Given that we are going to record MSPs over time in subsequent maps, and there may be a time lag between an MSP resigning and their replacement being elected at a by-election, there is an obvious need to keep track of the status of individual mebers. Possible tags….
- Elected at YYYY Scottish General Election (Constituency or Regional List) – All General Elections (a tage for each) in which the MSP has been elected (note this may not necessarily be for the same constituency or regional list)
- Elected post-YYYY (Constituency or Regional List)* – If the MSP was elected at a subsequent by-election.
MSP – Active Status – This tag indicates any change in circumstances since the MSP was last elected to the constituency.
- Still serving as elected – MSP still serving under the same party whip as last elected
- No longer under elected party whip – MSP no longer serving under the same party whip as last
- DECEASED – MSP has died
- RESIGNED – MSP has resigned
- REFUSED TO TAKE OFFICE – Candidate was successfully elected, but declined to take up their position
Note(s)
i) For any status that isn’t ‘Still serving as elected’, it will be expanded upon in the topic note.
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Attached Hyperlinks: Multiple
See next section for full details.
Scottish Parliament Elected Member (MSP) Political Knowledge Seed Branch
Official Parliamentary Knowledge Resources Official Party / MSP Controlled Knowledge Resources Externally Controlled Knowledge Resources
One of our philosophies at KnowledgeMappers is not to reinvent the wheel whenever possible. Thus we include hyperlinks to original official / definitive / plain old useful knowledge sources whenever possible, as well as links to Wikipedia pages for additional, “bigger picture” context (often not obvious, or even absent from, the original source). By doing this…
- original sources get used more often, by more people.
- errors get spotted quicker, thereby improving the information quality for everybody.
- updates get promulgated sooner to end users.
- rather than us having to interpret original sources to create further information resources around “big picture” context for a subject we are not experts in, users of our map can “get it straight from the horses mouth” as it were, so everybody benefits.
Note(s)
i) MindManager has the unique ability to have multiple hyperlinks attached to a single map branch, and to edit the default title text of the link to make it more meaningful to the user. This…
- greatly reduces the visual clutter of the map.
- means a full basket of links to official / definitive / useful knowledge resources about the subject can stay with the seed branch if it is re-used in other maps.
The chain icon at the end of a branch (rather than the favicon (icon) served by the linked-to website) indicates where a branch has more than one hyperlink.
ii) In the circular knowledge economy way of Wikipedia if there is knowledge that you could add to an existing page that is linked to, or even starting a page that doesn’t yet exist, then go for it! That’s what it’s all about!
iii) Not all of the resources below will exist for all MSPs.
The following knowledge resource links are attached to this seed branch (arranged in alphabetical order within the groupings)…
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Official Parliamentary Knowledge Resources
An elected representative is obliged to submit information to the institution authorities, who then publish it in the public domain on the institution website(s) as required, so this collection of knowledge resources is not under the control of the elected representative.
However how this member information is published and how the various strands are interconnected when presented to the user so they don’t have to go hunting for them on the website (or even websites plural), varies a lot between political institutions like parliaments and councils. There has been an improvement over the years but there’s still a ways to go.
Information that should be easily finable by the user are…
- contact details, including an e-mail address
- register of interests
- membership of official committes
- contributions to debates etc.
Note(s)
i) Institutions overhaul / revamp / upgrade / move stuff around on (or even completely replace) websites on an annoyingly frequent basis (usually just as we’re about to finish a map :-(. If the map links to specific pages / resources no longer work, and you can’t work out where it is from the menus in the new setup, then use the search bar!
ii) Moden web architecture allows the content of a ‘page’ to change interactively by user selection without this changing the URL (the web address in the browser bar) e.g. ‘tabs’ with different content. Thus…
- it is often not possible to link to specific resources because they are contained within the page e.g. register of interests.
- when you ‘arrive’ at the url you may still have to hunt around the page looking for the resource you want (e.g. click on a tab, unfold a section etc.)
Scottish Parliament MSP Profile – The Scottish Parliament has changed thier website since it first launched and MSP profile pages no longer contain any personal biography information about them (they used to do a wee introductory video about themselves), however there is improved interlinking across the different areas of the MSPs parlaimentary activitiy.
‘Tabbed’ subsections are…
- Contact details
- Committees
- Cross-party groups
- Parliamentary and Government Roles
- Party Roles
- Previous Roles
- Register of interests
And Recent Acctivity
- What was said
- Votes
- Motions
- Written questions
Contact Details – How to contact the MSP at the Scottish Parlaiment. It may also include constituency office contact details.
Email MP @parliament.scot – This is the official e-mail address of the MSP at the Scottish Parliament. Other contact details, are given on the MSPs official parliamentary profile page.
Register of Interests – The ‘Register of Interests’ provides details about MSPs’ financial interests and benefits. Anything that could be perceived as influencing an MSP’s votes, words or actions should be included, such as…
- payment for work done outside of MSP duties
- property and land ownership
- gifts
- overseas visits (related to work)
All MSPs are legally required to provide these details. The Register of Interests is publicly available and updated every time there is a change. MSPs must register any changes within 30 days. You can see each MSP’s register of interests on their page.
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Official Party / MP Controlled Knowledge Resources
This collection of knowledge resources is directly controlled by the MSP, or their political party, and consists of websites and social media accounts. As is the case with the ‘real world’, some MSPs have a bigger / more active ‘online presence’ than others…
Official Party MSP Profile – Most political parties provide a profile page of their MSP’s on their main website. They are usually fairly minimal in content. They may have some personal biography information, but at the very least will have contact details for the MSP and their local party association. Sometimes this is the only ‘official’ website an MSP has.
MSP’s Official Website – This is the MSP’s own wesbite and so is presumably under their control. That said some are better than others (or even absent completely), and are more personalised than ‘corporate template’. They usually provide details of how to get in touch with the MSP and local surgeries for constituents.
Facebook – MSP’s Facebook page if they have one. Many, but by no means all, do.
Twitter – MSP’s Twitter feed if they have one. Many, but by no means all, do, or still have (it’s not as if politicians could get vilified for something that they had ‘tweeted’ in the past or anything like that…).
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Externally Controlled Knowledge Resources
This collection of knowledge resources is published by external, and therefore ‘unofficial’, parties. With the sophisticated level of web technology available now, some combine and repackage knowledge from official parliamentary sources on the one ‘page’ as a service to consitiuents so they can get the full picture of what their MSP is actually doing in parliament. And then there’s good old Wikipedia, which is amazingly ‘current’ on UK politics.
The Public Whip Voting Record – A not for profit, open source project that ‘scrapes’ the flat text of the parliament Hansard (daily transcription of what is said) and turns it into a useful online database of meaningful knowledge about how individual MSPs have voted on specific ‘divisions’.
TheyWorkForYou – Another not for profit project run by mySociety, that ‘scrapes’ a variety of online sources of MSPs activities in parliament and turns them into a useful online knowlegde base of not just how individual MSPs have voted on specific issues, but also some analysis and sharing tools.
Who Can I Vote For? by Democracy Club – This is a ‘newly discovered by us’ website that not only lists all UK local and national elections and by-elections since 2016 (as well as the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections), but also has crowd-sourced details about all the candidates standing in each and every constituency or ward (eg. links to their official websites and social media as well as previous elections they may have stood in that they have details of). This particular link is to a page for the MSP as an individual candidate / elected representative, with links to their own websites & social media (if known), and their electoral history as a candidate in all UK elections going back to 2016, plus the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections (again if known).
Note(s)
i) The Democracy Club community interest company and associated volunteers are to be congratulated for the ‘Herculean’ efforts in creating this comprehensive, publicly accessible and free to use knowledge resource about all elections in the UK, and we do not envy them their task! The Who Can I Vote For? website is a constant work in progress so we’re sure it will change in the future, but as it stands right now, from our ‘knowledge mapping of links’ point of view, we have a few observations…
Elections
- There is one ‘All Elections’ page that, as the title suggests, lists all the UK elections covered by the site…
- European Parliament
- London Assembly
- Local Council
- Mayoral
- Police and Crime Commissioner
- Northern Ireland Assembly
- Referendum
- Scottish Parliament
- Senedd Cymru
- UK Parliament
- These are listed first by calendar date of occurence (in reverse order), and then alphabetically within that date group. So there is not a single page for a particular Constituency (or any other electoral area covered) that lists the links to all the elections that have happened there, including subsequent by-elections 🙁 .
- As can be imagined from the list of type of elections covered above, there is a lot to scroll through to find what you want (there is no search or filtering feature). So you really have to know the date when the election you are interested in happened in order to find it on the page before you can start drilling down. That said all the Scottish Local Council general elections take place on the same day (the first thursday in May), which helps (the same is not true for by-elections obviously).
- Elections in individual constituencies are not listed on this page, instead it will say ‘Scottish Parliament elections or by-election’. Clicking on that link will take you to an ‘index page’ where the individual constituencies in which an election has occured on that date (obviously all of them in a General Election) are listed in alphabetical order, and you then click on that link to get to the actual election page where the candidate listing is.
- After the election, the constituency page of all the candidates is updated to list the number of votes for each candidate as well as indicating which one was successfully elected. However there is no other data on the election itself – the total electorate, turnout etc. – which means that this is not an ‘everything you want to know about the election in the constituency all conveniently gathered into the one place’ knowledge resource (in the same way the election listing on Wikipedia only shows the results with no information about the candidates other than their party as the vast majority of them will not have a Wikpedia page that can be linked to).
- No unique identifying codes are used for the electoral units anywhere on the site and so units they are only identified by name.
Candidates / Elected representatives
- The contents of an individual candidate / elected representative’s page is entirely dependent on what’s been added by local volunteers and so it varies a lot – from ‘no further information on this person’ (including no profile picture), to all their social media accounts.
- It also relates to the last election they stood in, which could be in a different political ‘arena’. For example it is not uncommon for local councillors to stand for election as a member of the UK or Scottish Parliaments.
- A far as an individual’s election history section goes this is entirely dependent on what’s in the database. Thus if they stood for election before 2016, unless it was at the 2010 or 2015 UK General Elections, this section will be blank.
Wikipedia – Article on MSP (if available) – There is a Wikipedia article on just about all MSP’s, though the amount and quality of the content does vary. Usually it contains a bit more personal biographical information than is available from ‘official’ sources.
Note(s)
i) As with all Wikipedia links…
- If you know something that’s not there, get involved and add your contribution to the article so everybody can benefit from your knowledge.
- The external Links’ section at the bottom of the articles provides a great ‘jumping off point’ to discover new knowledge resources.
Hyperlinks to official / definitive / ‘plain old useful’ knowledge resources found in the public domain is one of the main focus of our knowledge maps. Links are added to our maps in 2 ways…
Multiple Hyperlinks Attached To Seed Branches – MindManager has the unique ability to attach multiple hyperlinks to a single map branch. This means that…
- maps need fewer branches so are less visually cluttered.
- a single branch can become a mini knowledge portal in it’s own right (one of the reasons why we call them ‘knowledge seed branches’).
- links to core knowledge resources (usually the most important links taken from the Link Collections) can remain with the branch when it’s re-used in other maps, whether or not it’s the kep focus of that map.
The multiple hyperlinks attached to the different types of knowledge seed branches in this map are already detailed in the ‘Seed Branches’ tab.
Knowledge Link Sub-Branch Collections – Sub-branches – each with a single attached hyperlink to an external knowledge resource – are grouped into related collections, such as ‘General Knowledge Resources’ or ‘Geographic Knowledge Resources’. This makes for easier, more ‘thumb friendly’ browsing & discovery of knowledge resources, which helps in more intensive activities like prolonged desktop research.
The knowledge link sub-branch collections in this map are detailed below…
Official Parliamentary MSP Knowledge Resources Links Collection
Scottish Parliament Member (MSP)
An elected representative is obliged to submit information to the institution authorities, who then publish it in the public domain on the institution website(s) as required, so this collection of knowledge resources is not under the control of the elected representative.
However how this member information is published and how the various strands are interconnected when presented to the user so they don’t have to go hunting for them on the website (or even websites plural), varies a lot between political institutions like parliaments and councils. There has been an improvement over the years but there’s still a ways to go.
Information that should be easily finable by the user are…
- contact details, including an e-mail address
- register of interests
- membership of official committes
- contributions to debates etc.
Note(s)
i) Institutions overhaul / revamp / upgrade / move stuff around on (or even completely replace) websites on an annoyingly frequent basis (usually just as we’re about to finish a map :-(. If the map links to specific pages / resources no longer work, and you can’t work out where it is from the menus in the new setup, then use the search bar!
ii) Moden web architecture allows the content of a ‘page’ to change interactively by user selection without this changing the URL (the web address in the browser bar) e.g. ‘tabs’ with different content. Thus…
- it is often not possible to link to specific resources because they are contained within the page e.g. register of interests.
- when you ‘arrive’ at the url you may still have to hunt around the page looking for the resource you want (e.g. click on a tab, unfold a section etc.)
Scottish Parliament MSP Profile – The Scottish Parliament has changed thier website since it first launched and MSP profile pages no longer contain any personal biography information about them (they used to do a wee introductory video about themselves), however there is improved interlinking across the differentareas of the MSPs parlaimentary activitiy.
‘Tabbed’ subsections are…
- Contact details
- Committees
- Cross-party groups
- Parliamentary and Government Roles
- Party Roles
- Previous Roles
- Register of interests
And Recent Acctivity
- What was said
- Votes
- Motions
- Written questions
Contact Details – How to contact the MSP at the Scottish Parlaiment. It may also include constituency office contact details.
Email MP @parliament.scot – This is the official e-mail address of the MSP at the Scottish Parliament. Other contact details, are given on the MSPs official parliamentary profile page.
Register of Interests – The ‘Register of Interests’ provides details about MSPs’ financial interests and benefits. Anything that could be perceived as influencing an MSP’s votes, words or actions should be included, such as…
- payment for work done outside of MSP duties
- property and land ownership
- gifts
- overseas visits (related to work)
All MSPs are legally required to provide these details. The Register of Interests is publicly available and updated every time there is a change. MSPs must register any changes within 30 days. You can see each MSP’s register of interests on their page.
Official Party/MSP Controlled MSP Knowledge Resources Links Collection
Scottish Parliament Member (MSP)
This collection of knowledge resources is directly controlled by the MSP, or their political party, and consists of websites and social media accounts. As is the case with the ‘real world’, some MSPs have a bigger / more active ‘online presence’ than others…
Official Party MSP Profile – Most political parties provide a profile page of their MSP’s on their main website. They are usually fairly minimal in content. They may have some personal biography information, but at the very least will have contact details for the MSP and their local party association. Sometimes this is the only ‘official’ website an MSP has.
MSP’s Official Website – This is the MSP’s own wesbite and so is presumably under their control. That said some are better than others (or even absent completely), and are more personalised than ‘corporate template’. They usually provide details of how to get in touch with the MSP and local surgeries for constituents.
Facebook – MSP’s Facebook page if they have one. Many, but by no means all, do.
Twitter – MSP’s Twitter feed if they have one. Many, but by no means all, do, or still have (it’s not as if politicians could get vilified for something that they had ‘tweeted’ in the past or anything like that…).
Externally Controlled MSP Knowledge Resource Links Collection
Scottish Parliament Member (MSP)
This collection of knowledge resources is published by external, and therefore ‘unofficial’, parties. With the sophisticated level of web technology available now, some combine and repackage knowledge from official parliamentary sources on the one ‘page’ as a service to consitiuents so they can get the full picture of what their MSP is actually doing in parliament. And then there’s good old Wikipedia, which is amazingly ‘current’ on UK politics.
The Public Whip Voting Record – A not for profit, open source project that ‘scrapes’ the flat text of the parliament Hansard (daily transcription of what is said) and turns it into a useful online database of meaningful knowledge about how individual MSPs have voted on specific ‘divisions’.
TheyWorkForYou – Another not for profit project run by mySociety, that ‘scrapes’ a variety of online sources of MSPs activities in parliament and turns them into a useful online knowlegde base of not just how individual MSPs have voted on specific issues, but also some analysis and sharing tools.
Who Can I Vote For? by Democracy Club – This is a ‘newly discovered by us’ website that not only lists all UK local and national elections and by-elections since 2016 (as well as the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections), but also has crowd-sourced details about all the candidates standing in each and every constituency or ward (eg. links to their official websites and social media as well as previous elections they may have stood in that they have details of). This particular link is to a page for the MSP as an individual candidate / elected representative, with links to their own websites & social media (if known), and their electoral history as a candidate in all UK elections going back to 2016, plus the 2015 & 2010 UK General Elections (again if known).
Note(s)
i) The Democracy Club community interest company and associated volunteers are to be congratulated for the ‘Herculean’ efforts in creating this comprehensive, publicly accessible and free to use knowledge resource about all elections in the UK, and we do not envy them their task! The Who Can I Vote For? website is a constant work in progress so we’re sure it will change in the future, but as it stands right now, from our ‘knowledge mapping of links’ point of view, we have a few observations…
Elections
- There is one ‘All Elections’ page that, as the title suggests, lists all the UK elections covered by the site…
- European Parliament
- London Assembly
- Local Council
- Mayoral
- Police and Crime Commissioner
- Northern Ireland Assembly
- Referendum
- Scottish Parliament
- Senedd Cymru
- UK Parliament
- These are listed first by calendar date of occurence (in reverse order), and then alphabetically within that date group. So there is not a single page for a particular Constituency (or any other electoral area covered) that lists the links to all the elections that have happened there, including subsequent by-elections 🙁 .
- As can be imagined from the list of type of elections covered above, there is a lot to scroll through to find what you want (there is no search or filtering feature). So you really have to know the date when the election you are interested in happened in order to find it on the page before you can start drilling down. That said all the Scottish Local Council general elections take place on the same day (the first thursday in May), which helps (the same is not true for by-elections obviously).
- Elections in individual constituencies are not listed on this page, instead it will say ‘Scottish Parliament elections or by-election’. Clicking on that link will take you to an ‘index page’ where the individual constituencies in which an election has occured on that date (obviously all of them in a General Election) are listed in alphabetical order, and you then click on that link to get to the actual election page where the candidate listing is.
- After the election, the constituency page of all the candidates is updated to list the number of votes for each candidate as well as indicating which one was successfully elected. However there is no other data on the election itself – the total electorate, turnout etc. – which means that this is not an ‘everything you want to know about the election in the constituency all conveniently gathered into the one place’ knowledge resource (in the same way the election listing on Wikipedia only shows the results with no information about the candidates other than their party as the vast majority of them will not have a Wikpedia page that can be linked to).
- No unique identifying codes are used for the electoral units anywhere on the site and so units they are only identified by name.
Candidates / Elected representatives
- The contents of an individual candidate / elected representative’s page is entirely dependent on what’s been added by local volunteers and so it varies a lot – from ‘no further information on this person’ (including no profile picture), to all their social media accounts.
- It also relates to the last election they stood in, which could be in a different political ‘arena’. For example it is not uncommon for local councillors to stand for election as a member of the UK or Scottish Parliaments.
- A far as an individual’s election history section goes this is entirely dependent on what’s in the database. Thus if they stood for election before 2016, unless it was at the 2010 or 2015 UK General Elections, this section will be blank.
Wikipedia – Article on MSP (if available) – There is a Wikipedia article on just about all MSP’s, though the amount and quality of the content does vary. Usually it contains a bit more personal biographical information than is available from ‘official’ sources.
Note(s)
i) As with all Wikipedia links…
- If you know something that’s not there, get involved and add your contribution to the article so everybody can benefit from your knowledge.
- The external Links’ section at the bottom of the articles provides a great ‘jumping off point’ to discover new knowledge resources.
We are continually striving to…
- find further, freely accessible in the public domain, definitive / official / plain old useful 🙂 knowledge resources about the ‘national local’ building blocks of Scotland to link to.
- incorporate more contextual knowledge where possible.
- and just generally push knowledge mapping to the limits :-).
All whilst keeping the existing map content up to date and not visually overwhelming the end users 🙂
The changelog(s) below summarise the actions undertaken to initially create – and subsequently update & improve – this knowledge map…
Note(s)
i) Version numbering – Our maps are principally referenced by their date of publication, however we also assign them a version number so we can internally keep track of them through the development process as publication dates are only decided during the final stages of the map creation / update process. Version 1.0 is obviously the first – and indeed may be the only – version of that map we have ever published. What version number comes next will depend on the subject matter….
- Maps involving electoral and political processes – Version numbers will be tied to the real world electoral cycle of the institution, which is usually regular, or at least has a maximum duration (eg. general elections to the Scottish Parliament or Scottish Local Councils are every 5 years, whilst to the UK Parliament it is every 5 years at most). By-elections – caused by the resignation / death of an elected member – are unpredicatable by their very nature. Thus the version number will be increased by 1 for the map published after general elections (eg. from 1.0 to 2.0), whilst updates due to by-elections by a decimal increment (eg. from 1.0 to 1.1). In either case the new version may also include other changes to the content, such as the incorporation of links to more knowledge resources and/or embedded/attached contextual knowledge elements.
ii) Update frequency – Maps by their very nature – a visually structured knowledge record of the ‘real world’ created through ‘field’ survey and data collection – are tied to a publication date, which users need to take cognisance of as the real world inevitably changes over time. How often we update and re-publish a map will depend on the frequency of those real world changes, and our own resources (with the best will in the world we will always be playing catch-up)…
- Maps involving electoral and political processes – As already mentioned the frequency of General Elections are mostly preset, and so we will endeavour to update a map as soon as practicable after them (though it may take a while for the knowledge resources to catch up with events, especially for newly elected members). The frequency of by-elections however varies greatly, there is a lot more ‘natural churn’ of the 1,127 Scottish Local Councillors compared to just 59 UK Parliament Scottish MPs (the last UK by-election in Scotland was Inverclyde in 2011). Thus electoral maps involving Local Councillors will be need to be updated and re-published more frequently.
Scottish Parliament Regions, Constituencies & Members – Polticial Knowledge Atlas (10 Apr 2020)
Version – 1.0
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Map Branches – 1,763
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Links to knowledge resources – 2,950
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File Sizes – HTML5 (.html): 29.3 MB; MindManager (.mmap): 20.2 MB
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Basemap Framework(s) – This is the basemap!
Note that other than Wikipedia (and the Boundary Commission for official maps), we have not discovered any general knowledge resources about Scottish Parliament Regions or Constituencies in the public domain, not even on the Scottish Parliament website or the Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe). Thus unlike the other governance & politics maps we have created so far, we are producing the ‘Political Knowledge Atlas’ for the Scottish Parliament without having produced a ‘General, Geographic & Electoral Knowledge Atlas’ about the electoral areas first. Thus we are truly starting from scratch with this map for both them and elected members.
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Actions – The main work done in making this version of the map was…
Design main branch framework of electoral areas
This is going to have to be the most complex layout of our political knowledge maps so far as the voting system for the Scottish Parliament to elect it’s 129 members (MSP’s) is a dual system…
- Constituencies – There are 73 constituencies covering the whole country in which a single member (MSP) is elected by the traditional ‘first past the post’ system.
- Electoral Regions – 8-10 adjacent constituencies are aggregated to form 8, roughly equal in population size, multi-member, Electoral Regions, each electing 7 (so 56 in total) ‘regional list’ MSPs by the additional member (AMS) proportional representation system in order from each party’s candidate list.
This means that…
- Overall map structure – because the electoral geographies of the Scottish Parliament are fundamentally arranged around Electoral Regions, they must form the main branch framework for this map.
- Electoral Region knowledge seed branches – because there is that difference between the regional and constituency voting systems, 2 knowledge seed branches will be required for each region…
- Electoral Region main branch – will create the logical and physical framework for all the other branches, sets the geographic scene with an embedded map and ‘sums up’ all the region level and individual contutuency election results in the one place.
- Electoral Region ‘region level only’ branch – this sub-branch will be dedicated just to the regional level election results, as well as being a collection branch for those ‘regional list’ MSP seed branches.
- Constituency knowledge seed branches – even though constituencies are fundamentally different electorally, they too must be presented within their regional context, and so 2 types of constituency-related knowledge seed branches will also be required…
- Individual constituency seed branches – for every constituency, with an embedded map and all election results, as well as a sub-seed branch for the current constitiuency MSP.
- Electoral Region ‘Constituency Level’ collection branch – required to collect all the individual constituency seed branches within the region, this branch will also ‘sum up’ all the individual constituency results in the one place.
- MSP knowledge seed branches – once elected constituency and ‘regional list’ MSPs have equal status, however in the map their seed branches will be listed separately under the regional or constituency branches. Due to the different electoral systems their embedded electoral results will have to be recorded differently (although as an MSP could have been both types of MSP over their career, both formats can be present on the one branch). All will have sub-branch collections of knowledge resources about them.
- National ‘Scotland as a whole’ seed branch – it is combined results from the individual constituencies and regions that determine the overall national outcome of the Scottish General Election and which party will form the government of Scotland. Thus a branch will be required in order to show the ‘national picture’.
Jings! Crivvens! Help ma boab!
Create main layout / proto seed / collection branches
As mentioned above the main framework will be made by electoral area seed branches along with collection branches, so as with other official electoral areas we need to start with the Scottish Government’s Standard Geographic Codes Register – Scotland Excel spreadsheet (part of the Small Area Statistics Reference Documents), and then create the following branches…
- Scottish Parliament Region as a whole – import the ‘live’ (as opposed to ‘archived’) entries from the ‘S17 Scottish Parliamentary Regions (S17_SPR)’ workbook to create proto seed branches for each Electoral Region. Add them to the central topic to form the main framework branches.
- Scottish Parliament Region only – duplicate each proto Regional seed branch and add it as a sub-branch to itself. Re-title the copy as ‘Regional List Results and Current MSPs’. This will be both the seed branch for ‘region only’ political knowledge, and a collection branch for the ‘regional list’ MSPs.
- Consitituencies Collection branch – create another sub-branch at the same level entitled ‘Individual Constituency Results & Current MSPs’. This will be both the seed branch for ‘constituencies as a whole within the region only’ political knowledge and a collection branch for the individual constituency and constituency MSP seed branches.
- Scottish Parliament Constituencies – import the ‘live’ (as opposed to ‘archived’) entries from the ‘S16 Scottish Parliamentary Constituencies (S16_SPC)’ workbook to create proto seed branches for each constituency. Add them as sub-branches to the appropriate ‘Individual Constituency Results & Current MSPs’ collection branch.
- Scotland As A Whole – create this as another main branch at the same level as the main framework regional branches
OK now we can start building out the seed branches!
Create Electoral Area seed branches
Do everything required to turn those bare proto seed branches for Electoral Regions and Constituencies into full blown knowledge seed branches. So…. tracking down official / defnitive / plain old useful general, geographic and electoral knowledge resources about Scottish Parliament Electoral Regions and Constituencies and using the knowledge contained therein to embed and attach contextual knowledge elements to build up the knowledge seed branches in the usual organic, iterative process.
Note the ‘Contributing Online Knowledge-bases’ meta branch is created during this process as a ‘working area’ to collect, triage and manage links to discovered knowledge resources before adding to the seed branches.
As with other electoral area political knowledge maps the following knowledge elements are essential…
- Electoral results spreadsheet tables – Create a template table for elections going back to the start of the parliament in 1999 and populate with the results by political party from the relevant Wikipedia articles (the only source of all general and by-election results going back to 1999).
- Location map images – create these as screenshots from the geographic resources (see notes below).
- GEO index marker tags – amongst the marker tags created for regions (‘SCOT PARL REGN’) and constituencies (‘SCOT PARL CONS’), there are ones for ‘GEO Look-Up Geographies’ which indicate the area’s overlap with other electoral and administrative geographic areas, and which can only be derived by spatial analysis.
Create Elected Members (MSPs) proto seed branches
Create proto seed branches for currently elected regional and constituency MSPs as sub-branches to the relevant electoral area seed branch. As there is no data download available of current MSPs, they have to be created manually working from the official source on the Scottish Parliament website.
Create Elected Members (MSPs) knowledge seed branches
Do everything required to turn those bare proto branches into full blown knowledge seed branches about Members of Parliament. So…. tracking down and adding links to the official / defnitive / plain old useful knowledge resources we could find out about them (eg. their official profile pages & entry in the register of members interests) to embed and attach contextual knowledge elements to build up the knowledge seed branches in the usual organic, iterative process. Note as constituency and regional MSPs are elected in 2 fundamentally different ways, but an individual MSP could have been both in their political career to date, the system for encoding & embedding their ‘electoral victories’ in the seed branches needs to be flexible!
Also as for the electoral areas the ‘Contributing Online Knowledge-bases’ meta branch is utilised as a ‘working area’ during this process.
Create MSP knowledge links collection sub-branches and attached multiple links
Creation of stylised individual sub-branches with a single link – one for each of the said, quality assessed, knowledge resources about Scottish Parliament Members – arranged in collections based on it’s custodian…
- Official Parliamentary MSP Knowledge Resources
- Official Party/MSP Controlled MSP Knowledge Resources
- Externally Controlled MSP Knowledge Resources
Then add the links to the core resources from the collections as multiple links on the MSP seed branch so that they remain part of the branch, even if it is re-purposed or re-used in other maps.
Note the titles of all links have to be manually changed from that supplied automatically by the resource website to our standard nomenclature of ‘Source – Title’ eg. ‘Wikipedia – Michael Russell (politician)‘ (as opposed to ‘Michael Russell (politician) – Wikipedia’).
Colour seed branches by political party
Using MindManager’s ‘smart rules’ feature create rules that sets the fill colour of the seed branches by their political party using index marker tags attached to them during the seedbranch building process…
- Constituency seed branch – ‘SCOT PARL CONS – Current Political Party’ tag
- MSP seed branch – ‘MSP – Political Affiliation (Current)’ tag
Note as the Electoral Regions are multi-member it is not possible to colour them, and so the colours of the embedded results spreadsheet will have to serve the purpose there.
Create ‘Map Legend’ meta branch
With the seed branch content finalised, create the Map Legend meta branch to fully describe all the branches and the knowledge elements attached to / embedded within them. Note all the content of the ‘Seed Branches’ and ‘Link Collections’ tabs on this page are also included in the ‘Map Legend’ meta branch.
Finalise ‘Contributing Online Knowlege-bases’ meta branch
As the main ‘working area’ of the map during development, the final content needs to be decided, redundant content removed, and what’s left tidied up and given the old ‘information cartography’ magic. Note not all the resources we discover are ‘linkable to’ from the perspective of individual knowledge seed branches, but if we deem them useful they can at least still be included in the map here. Also only the resource content that is relevant to the map is documented here, though each level of the navigation pathway to that content is included as hierarchical sub-branches so that it is discoverable within a bigger picture context.
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Note(s)
i) This map has been a long time coming – In the Knowledge Mappers archive the earliest test map of the Scottish Parliament is dated 2005, so it’s always been ‘in the pipeline’. However several factors have delayed this map until now…
- our last map was well before the last election in 2016.
- the Scottish Parliament has changed the architecture of their website (goodbye any maps!) so even for those who were still members, most hyperlinks were not working.
- subsequent advances in MindManger’s capabilities that we have taken advantage of (indeed honed) for the mapping of electoral areas and their elected members when creating our political knowledge atlases for Scottish Local Councils, Wards & Councillors and UK Parliament Scottish Constituencies and Members.
- On that last one, the sudden announcement in late October last year of a UK General Election on the 12th of December 2019 – just over 2 years after the last one, and the 3rd in 4 years – threw ‘the cat amongst the pigeons’ as far as our production schedule was concerned as creating the basic visual knowledge framework from scratch, and then subsequent maps, for the Scottish Constituencies and Members of the UK Parliament suddenly became the urgent priority. This task was very much not helped by the fact that the UK Parliament was in the middle of producing a new website, with both old and new versions (with different URLs and navigation structure) in circulation at the same time. Doh!
- Did we mention it’s the most complicated system to map?
Anyway it’s here now, and that’s all that matters 🙂
ii) Updates due to changes in Political knowledge resource content – The following changes will trigger an update to this map….
- By-elections – The resignation / death of a sitting MSP will cause a vacancy. However what happens next will depend on what sort of MSP they were…
- Regional MSP – There are no ‘regional by-elections’. If a Regional List MSP dies in office or resigns, then in theory the next available un-elected candidate on the party’s regional list at the last election will take over. However if the individual concerned has moved on in life and no longer ‘wants the gig’ (especially if this is happening a long time after the election), the party will work it’s way down it’s list until they find a former candidate that does fancy giving it a go.
- Constituency MSP – If a Constituency MSP dies in office or resigns, then that will trigger a local by-election (usually in a few weeks), which may or may not be won by another party! Also it is often the case that one or more sitting Regional MSPs will contest it for their party as the position of a constituency MSP is slightly less perilous. If successfully elected this will trigger a vacancy on the regional list (see above!).
Unlike Local Councillors where there are ‘a dozon or so’ by-elections every year due to resignations, deaths or party shenanigans, Constituency By-elections or changes in the regional MSPs in the Scottish Parliament are relatively infrequent. The last Scottish Parliamentary by-election was Shetland in 2019, preceded by Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire in 2017, Cowdenbeath in 2014, Dunfermline and Aberdeen Donside in 2013, and Moray in 2006. Thus there may be a couple per parliamentary term, or there may be none, but if there is one, that would trigger an update and re-publishing of this map.
- General Elections – Unlike the UK Parliament which in theory has a maximum 5 year term but in practice “events dear boy, events!” have given us 3 general elections in the last 4 years, the Scottish Parliament terms are fixed at 5 (but previously 4) years. Thus we do not anticiapte having to update the ‘Electoral Resources’ in this map until after the next General Election in May 2021.
- Other – Whilst not common, the political allegiance of an individual MSP may change for a variety of reasons – they may be suspended by their party (‘lose the whip’) and have to sit as an ‘independent’, or they may leave it voluntarily and do so, or they may even ‘cross the floor’ and join another party. Basically a lot of shenanigans can go on that will be material changes to the map contents without an election being involved (for example if an MSP is successfully elected to the UK Parliament at a UK General Election they are not obliged to resign as an MSP). However these wouldn’t immediately trigger this map to be re-published as such actions of an individual MSP could be of a temporary nature, but if they persisted, or involved multiple MSPs, that may be reason enough if the map has not been updated for a while.
An explanation of the electoral system for the Scottish Parliament can be found on Wikipedia here.
iii) Updates due to changes in General knowledge resource – As mentioned earlier there is a dearth of official knowledge resources about electoral regions especially but also constituencies. Should that change (looking at you Scottish Parliament website) then it would be worth re-publishing this map just for that!
iv) Updates due to changes in Geographic knowledge resource content – The geographic aspect of Scottish Parliament Electoral Regions and Constituencies – basically their boundaries with neighbouring areas – is the most stable, at least compared to an annual update cycle. However they are not static in perpetuity….
- Scheduled boundary reviews – There are ‘standing orders’ to review the boundaries of all electoral areas every 10-12 years or so, so that the ‘electorate to elected member ratio’ is the same, or at least within defined ‘quota’ limits (so that each vote ‘counts the same’ in an election no matter where the voter lives). With general electoral cycles of 5 years, this means that boundaries are fixed for at least 2 general elections. And it is usually the case that, whilst all boundaries are reviewed at a regular review, not all them are changed as some areas will still be deemed to be within ‘quota’ limits. Thus some electoral areas may persist with unaltered boundaries for 20 years or so.
Note that the first review of Scottish Parliamentary boundaries implemented for the 2011 election was quite substantive as the electoral & administrative geographies that were previously used to create the initial boundaries had all completely changed since 1999 when the parliament started. The 2nd review is scheduled to happen after the 2021 election, with changes being implemented for the 2026 general election. - Interim reviews – these may happen at the local level (ie. only affecting 2 or 3 areas with mutual borders) due to some change in local circumstances. They happen very infrequently, and not without an extensive prior consultation process (ie. they don’t just suddenly happen), so any that do occur will be picked up in the at least annual reviews of the map.
Note there have been 2 interim reviews since the 1999.
v) General map evolution – As mentioned already we are continually striving to improve our map making processes. This impacts content in 2 ways….
- Improving the way we present content – as well as us just getting better at this whole information cartography malarky (especially when it comes to mapping electoral knowledge), MindManager software is continually being developed and we will take advantage of new or improved features where possible (for example the ability to change the thickness of the lines for map branches was a ‘cartographic game changer’ as far as we were concerned when it was introduced a couple of years ago) .
- Extending the content – this can be extending the range of the existing content (eg. including electoral results from a more extended period), as well as including newly discovered resources.
Whichever, if these developments are advancd enough they will merit revision and re-publishing of the map.
vi) Electoral Area location map images – In this map only the electoral region seed branches will have screenshots of the official boundary maps, constituencies will just have thumbnail outline maps as we’re not sure of the impact of additional overhead of 73 bigger map images for constituencies. We will revisit this for the next edition of this map.
iii) In-between websites – As ever (so it seems) one of the major official knowledge resources is in the process of re-designing their website. The Local Government Boundary Commission for Scotland – the body tasked with creating and periodically reviewing local government electoral boundaries and producing official boundary maps (that we link to) – took over responsibility for Scottish Parliament electoral boundaries in 2017. They have re-organised their website to reflect both functions and changed their branding and URL altogether twice since the Scotland The Map project began in 2019. Doh!
New to our knowledge maps? Find out all about them below.
Created using our unique mix of professional information hunting & cartography skills and MindManager, the world leading information mapping software, our ground-breaking knowledge maps are an interactive, visualy structured, ‘discover within the bigger picture context’ index of…
- what ‘building blocks’ make up a given ‘knowledge space’.
- what knowledge resources about them exist in the public domain.
- the links to where those resources are online (ie. their URL), so map users can access them ‘there and then’ with a click of their mouse.
Created using our unique mix of professional information hunting & cartography skills and MindManager, the world leading information mapping software, our ground-breaking knowledge maps are an interactive, visualy structured, ‘discover within the bigger picture context’ index of…
- what ‘building blocks’ make up a given ‘knowledge space’.
- what knowledge resources about them exist in the public domain.
- the links to where those resources are online (ie. their URL), so map users can access them ‘there and then’ with a click of their mouse.
Anatomy of a knowledge map
Our knowledge maps are built from 2 different sorts of components that together, we hope you agree, make something that is much greater than the sum of it’s individual parts…
Hierarchical framework of interconnected branches
The framework of the knowledge map is made up of interconnected branches – of varying colours, shapes, and sizes, which are arranged in a visually connected hierarchy around a central topic. There are different ‘types’ of branches within our knowledge maps (though the types are not all mutually exclusive).
Embedded / attached knowledge elements
Each branch in the map has a mix of elements – often unque to MindManger – embedded within, or attached to, it and/or has some other physical attribute, that conveys core knowledge, or link to primary knowledge resources, about the ‘real world building block’ the branch represents.
Find out more below…
The framework of the knowledge map is made up of interconnected branches (of varying colours, shapes and sizes), which are arranged in a visually connected hierarchy around a central topic. There are different ‘types’ of branches within our knowledge maps (though the types are not all mutually exclusive)…
Central topic
Contains the map title, publishing details and a central image.
Main framework branches
The next one or two levels of branches define the layout of the map, in 2 different ways…
- Physical layout – how the branches are physically arranged around the central topic. The classic mindmap structure is branches radiating in all directions from a central topic, however MindManager has many more options. As our knowledge maps are reference maps – i.e. the user ‘looks up’ the knowledge within them – our aim is to fill the width of the screen with visual knowledge, whilst minimising the amount of horizontal / vertical scrolling required by the user. Thus we usually use an ‘org-tree’ layout – the 1st level of main branches are arranged horizontally like an organisation chart, with all the sub-branches arranged in a vertical, hierarchical tree like structure below them.
- Logical layout – the logical arrangement of the seed branches with respect to the central topic. This needs to fit in with the ways we humans structure the world in our heads in order to break it down into manageable chunks so we can make sense of it. This arrangement could be alphabetical, geographical, chronological, or a combination (e.g. alphabetical within geographic areas & sub-areas).
Knowledge Seed branches
These are the main focus of the knowledge map, with each seed branch representing a particular building block in the real world e.g. geographic subdivisions, public bodies, elected representatives, communities etc. These are ‘visually rich’, with multiple embedded and attached knowledge elements, including core images like logos and geographic maps as well as links to online knowledge resources, and so are mini knowledge portals in their own right (see below).
Collection branches
These enable the grouping of related sub-branches, and can appear at more than one level in the map hierarchy.
Knowledge Resource Link branches
These sub-branches each have a single attached hyperlink to an external knowledge resource, with the branch title being that of the resource. They are grouped into related collections, such as ‘General Knowledge Resources’ or ‘Geographic Knowledge Resources’. Having a branch linking solely to one knowledge resource enables easier, more ‘thumb friendly’ browsing & discovery of them, which helps in more intensive activities like prolonged desktop research.
Map Meta branches
These are branches that tell the user more about the map and how to get the most out of it…
- Map Legend branch – Describes in detail each of the different types of branches – and the different knowledge elements embedded within or attached to them – that make up this particular map.
- Contributing Knowledgebases branch – Describes the various official / defnitive / plain old useful online, public domain knowledge resources that we have discovered and ‘tapped into’ to make this map, grouped into related collections, such as ‘General Knowledge Resources’ or ‘Geographic Knowledge Resources’ etc. Many are linked to directly within the knowledge seed or related knowledge resource links collection branches in the main map, whilst some cannot be linked to at the deep level of ‘individual building blocks’, but all are worthy of further exploration if you are interested in the subject area of the map.
- Floating branches – As the name suggests these are not visually connected to the framework branches. Because they are more visually prominent within the map, they are usually used to point the user in the right ‘direction’.
Each branch has a mix of elements embedded within, or attached to, it and/or has some other physical attribute that conveys core knowledge, or link to primary knowledge resources, about the ‘real world building block’ the branch represents. Created using functionality that is often unque to MindManger, these ‘knowledge elements’ take the form of…
Outline Shape
This may convey knowledge about some aspect of the subject of the branch. For example for branches representing geographic areas, the outline shape indicates the nature of its’ borders with neighbouring areas with respect to the sea…
CIRCLE = all coastal borders (ie. ‘island(s)’)
HEXAGON = all land borders (ie. ‘land-locked’)
ROUNDED RECTANGLE = mixed coastal & Land borders
Fill Colour
Sometimes the colour filling a branch conveys knowledge eg. a particular political party.
Image [Embedded]
Images such as logos, thumbnail location maps, flags, icons, people profile pictures etc. provide a unique visual element that users can instantly ‘latch onto’ as they navigate their way around the map.
Text
Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters within a single text ‘string’ – we can pack several different pieces of ‘core knowledge’ – such as names & unique identifying codes (taken from official sources) – into the text of a single branch without it visually overwhelming the user.
Note [Attached]
A branch note can contain all the elements of a word processed page – variably formatted (‘rich’) text, links, tables and images, and so is an ideal place for supplementary information that would otherwise add visual clutter to the map.
Data Elements [Embedded] MindManager has 2 unique ways to add contextual ‘facts & figures’ (i.e. text and number fields) to individual branches so that they are visible to the user (though only one can be used on any given branch)…
Spreadsheet Table / Chart –A branch specific spreadsheet table created using MindManager’s spreadshet tool (i.e. not referencing cells in a ‘normal’ spreadsheet file stored elsewhere), with all the usual functionality available. If the data content is structured appropriately, it can be toggled between ‘table’ and ‘chart’ view (though this view is ‘fixed’ when the map is exported to create the HTML version).
Multiple Single Data Fields – These are like single cells in a spreadsheet and the values – which can be text or numeric – can be used to format the branch using MindManager’s Smart Rules feature.
Index Marker Tags [Attached]
Arranged in groups and added to individual branches as appropriate, index marker tags add visible contextual knowledge, enable map filtering to show / hide only those branches with specified tags, and internal map navigation.
Multiple Hyperlinks [Attached]
Another unique feature, multiple links to a range of official definitive / plain old useful knowledge resources attached to the seed branch – usually selected from the full range of general & geographic knowledge resource collections – help turn the map into a knowledge portal without adding to the visual clutter.
File formats
We make our knowledge maps available to download in 2 file formats…
MindManager (.mmap)
MindManager (.mmap) maps are the original maps we create. Thus when opened in the world’s best information mapping software, all the features of are available for full featured viewing, amending, expanding, adapting and using in other MindManager maps. These files can often be imported into other ‘mindmapping’ software applications, but with caveats (see the ‘Other mindmapping software’ tab below…).
HTML5 (.html)
HTML5 (.html) versions of our maps retain all the content – and most of the interactivity – of the original MindManager map (from which they are exported). They can be viewed by anybody, in any modern web browser software, on any digital device, without the need for any software plugins, as stand-alone files or embedded in web pages, on(or off)-line (once dowloaded).
Find out more below…
MindManager (.mmap) maps are the original maps we create. Thus when opened in MindManager, all the features of the world’s best information mapping software are available for…
- full feature viewing…
- editing & amending…
- expanding with aditional content…
- adapting & re-purposing…
- re-using, in whole or in part, in other MindManager maps….
MindManager Professional for individuals & small teams is available for multiple platforms – Windows, Mac, MS Teams, Chromebook, & Web.
MindManager Enterprise for users of 5 or more can be centrally installed on local area network servers and can integrate with other enterprise applications like Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
There is also a free mobile app called MindManager Go for Android and iOS.
There are Special Licence programs available for government, non-profit, and educational institutions.
A fully functioning 30 day free trial copy can be downloaded from here. At the end of the trial period MindManager remains fully functioning, apart from the ability to save files. Thus it can continue to be used as a free file reader for our knowledge maps in MindManager format in perpetuity. Although we think that you will want to keep it a spart of your digital toolbox (see the ‘MindManager – More than just mindmapping software’ tab in the ‘How we got here…’ section below for more information).
HTML5 (.html) knowledge maps retain all the content – and most of the interactivity – of the original MindManager map (from which they are exported). For example they can be interactively queried by filtering using index marker tags to hide / show / highlight the coresponding branches.
And, just like any other html file, they can be …
- viewed by anybody, in any modern internet browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safara etc.), on or offline (once downloaded), on any device…
- shared by email or file sharing services (eg. DropBox).
- published online as stand-alone web pages, such that they have their own URL (which can be shared), or even embedded within existing pages (and hosted somewhere else eg. the aforementioned URL).
However HTML maps cannot be edited or ammended, or content copied and used in other maps.
Find out more about them in the ‘Using HTML maps’ section below…
Because MindManager was the first software of it’s type and has been the market leader for over 20 years, many other ‘mindmapping’ software programmes (or online platforms) that have subsequently emerged have the capability of importing map files in MindManager (.mmap) format. A word of caution however…
Our maps fully utilise the large range of unique ‘information cartography’ features available in MindManager…
- large maps (1000’s of branches)
- ‘rich (ie. variably) formatted’ topic text
- multiple hyperlinks attached to a single branch
- embedded data features (spreadsheets, charts & topic properties)
- configurable sub-branch layout options for every branch within the one map
These features are not supported by other ‘mindmapping’ software programs. Thus even if your program can import a MindManager file, how it copes with each of these features, and what it renders on-screen as a result, will vary from the MindManager version so user beware!
Using HTML maps
The fact that our knowledge maps can be published as HTML5 files – viewable in any modern web browser software, on any digital device, without the need for any software plugins, as stand-alone files or embedded in web pages, on(or off)-line – means they can be viewed & used by anybody!
However unlike MindManager users, almost by definition those who are using our HTML maps for the first time will be unfamiliar with the whole ‘knowledge map thing’ – what the different parts are, how you interact with it, how you acess the embedded / attached content (eg. accessing the multiple hyperlinks to knowledge resources, or filtering the map using marker tags).
That’s why we’ve produced the content (including short videos) below…
MindManager is the only information mapping software that can also publish it’s maps as HTML5 files…
So what is the difference between the original MindManager (.mmap) and the exported HTML version? Well HTML knowledge maps are…
Just about the same as the original – HTML versions of knowledge maps retain all the rich, visual content – and just about all the functional interactivity – of the original MindManager map, though how the user interacts with that functionality does differ a bit. It’s also continually being developed. For example HTML maps can now be visually filtered using the index marker tags attached to branches.
A bit bigger – The file size of the HTML version of the map is about 40 – 50% bigger than the original MindManager (.mmap) file, depending on the type of content (the presence of lots of images is really what bumps up the file size no matter which file format).
Easily Viewed – Just as importantly HTML map files can be viewed…
- In any modern web browser software – Which is basically all of them – Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge etc…
- On any device – Desktop computers, tablets and smart phones (all of which come with browsers pre-installed!)
- Without the need for any software plugins – No need for additional bits of software to be downloaded and installed on your device in order to open and view your file properly,
- As standalone files or embedded in web pages – The .html file can be viewed as you would any other file downloaded from the web or file sharing service (eg. Dropbox), or sent as an email attachment – by double clicking on it on the device. However like a Google Map it can also be embedded within a frame on a web page and viewed without the viewer consciously downloading anything (the file still has to be physically ‘hosted’ on a server somewhere and ‘served’ to the page when viewed). An example would be our ‘map of maps’ is embedded in the footer of every page of this website.
- On-, or off-, line – Once the file – or the web page in which its is embedded – has downloaded to the device, there is no need for an internet connection in order for it to be viewed and interacted with. Obviously a connection is required to view the online knowledge resources linked to in the map, but the contextual knowledge contained in the seed branches of the map itself will be available.
‘Thumb Friendly’ – Easily interacted with on small touch screen devices such as mobile phones.
Find out more about map elements, basic navigation and some tips for viewing on mobile devices in the following sections…
We pack a lot of knowledge ‘bits & pieces’ into our maps, either embedded within, or attached to, the 100’s of map branches (‘topics’) that provide the visual structure that connects them all together. This video explains the different types of knowledge content….
Now that you know the different elements that make up one of our knowledge maps, this video shows the basics of navigating your way around it and accessing the public domain knowledge resources via the hyperlinks….
As stated already our HTML knowledge maps are “thumb friendly and viewable in any modern browser, on any device”. Here are a few extra tips to enhance your user experience if viewing maps on a small touch-screen device…
Vertical Scrolling Of Webpage – If your ‘scrolling thumb’ is anywhere within the embedded map window when it slides across the touch-screen, you will pan around the map rather than scroll the webpage as a whole. To counter this there is always a narrow margin around the map panel at the edges of the screen, which you can ‘drag’ to move the page. (Viewing the map full screen in a new browser tab also gets round this issue :-).
Activating Branch Content – Clicking on map branches will activate content. Notes & the list of attached hyperlinks will open up in a side panel in the browser window. On mobile phones this panel can be take up a disconcertingly large proportion of the screen. If you don’t want to access this content, just click on the map background away from the activated branch, and the panel will disappear.
Following Hyperlinks – If there is a single hyperlink on a branch then clicking on the favicon symbol at the end once will activate it and the web resource linked to will open up in a new browser tab. If the topic has multiple hyperlinks attached (another unique MindManager feature) then these can only be followed by clicking on the link in the list in the side panel that opens up within the browser window when the branch is clicked. Note that notes and hyperlinks are on separate tabs within the sidepanel if both are present. Hyperlinks are listed in the ‘Attachments’ tab.
Benefits
Our knowldge maps work on many levels…
- visually structured indexes of what ‘things’ exist in a defined ‘space’.
- visually structured index of knowledge resources about the ‘things’ available in the public domain.
- visually structured portal to said knowledge resources (discover & access with a couple of mouse clicks).
- visually structured source of rich contextual, ‘big picture’ knowledge about the ‘things’.
Find out more about the benefits they bring to users below…
Users of all our maps (HTML or MindManger) enjoy these benefits…
Visual Register – Maps are the official / definitive list of what’s what, visually structured in a way that makes it easier to see what’s there and understand the context.
Big Picture – See everything in the context of the bigger picture.
Contextual Knowledge – MindManager’s many unique information cartography features – rich (variably formatted) text, embedded images, embedded spreadsheets / charts / data fields, attached index marker tags – enable much useful knowledge to be visually encoded in the map so users don’t even have to look up the linked knowledge resources in many instances.
Fast Search – Even when a map has 100’s / 1000’s of branches & links, searching the content – in all the different ‘information channels’ that MindManager provides – is super quick.
Knowledge Portal – Maps contain 100’s / 1000’s of single / multiple hyperlinks attached to the map branches, which means a virtual library of official / definitive / plain old useful online knowledge resources about the ‘things’ in the register is no more than a mouse click away. The visual structure of the map makes it easier to discover, assimilate and utilise the new knowledge eg. for desktop research.
Interactively Query – Users can query the map using the filter function to hide / show branches based on the index marker tags attached to them (even the HTML ones).
Share – As they are single files, maps can be easily shared as email attachments, via file sharing services, or as downloads. HTML files have the added ability to be pusblished as standalone webpages, or embedded in existing web pages.
Print – Maps can be printed, in their entirety or in it’s filtered state. Printouts can be used as a visual prop to facilitate discussions and meetings amongst stakeholders, no matter how impromptu.
Archive – Because the maps are an actual digital file (as opposed to a web page constructed from a database), they can be permanently preserved as a knowledge artefact by simply saving it in a digital archive. Obviously as time goes on the knowledge in the map will gradually be superceded and the URL’s for the linked resources therein may no longer work, however the knowledge that this was the big picture at one time and that these knowledge resources about it existed (and may still exist but now at a new URL?) will still be useful in the future.
Discovering knowledge is usually just the starting point. Once it has been understood & assimilated, users want to do things with it, depending on why they were looking for it in the first place. MindManager users therefore have further options available to them to take our knowledge maps to the next level for their own benefit…
Living Document – As well as re-arranging the existing content to suit them, users are free to add their own, as and when they want, turning the map into their own living document. So for example users can add their own appointments & events (with links to files etc.) to our calendar maps, turning them into their personal diaries, after having first perhaps removed some of the content (eg. international events), or added another level of granularity using content from the time template map, to personalise it. Or if undertaking desktop research using our world atlas knowledge maps, they can selectively add the newly disocovered knowledge to the map as sub-branches and/or branch notes on the existing seed branch, which has the added beenfit of retaining the ‘big picture context’ of where it came from in the first place.
Template Basemap – If your need to add / ammend your map with the latest knowledge is ongoing, then you can think of it in terms of a ‘basemap’, to which you are adding additional ‘layers’ of knowledge (just like ‘layers’ of geographic ‘things’ – points, lines, polygons, travel routes – on top of a geographic basemap from Ordnance Survey or Google). Once you have a basemap template, it is easy to re-purpose for many other uses without having to start from scratch each time.
Content Source – Use any of the content of the map in other maps as appropriate. So not just whole branches withtheir sub-branches, but individuala embedded / attached elements like spreadsheets / charts, data fields, hyperlinks etc. This could be a simple, one off ‘copy & paste’, or creating a map part that is saved to your parts library so that it it is instantly accessible to be added to any map without recourse to the original source map.
Index Marker Tag Source – This is especially true of groups of index marker tags, used to tag map branches. Thanks to the great MAP add-in from our partners at Olympic, a whole new group of marker tags can be created from a whole level of map sub-branches with a single mouse click. As our maps are usually definitive registers of ‘real world things’, our maps always contain those as a groupf of marker tags as well as branches. For example our world atlas knowledge maps contain tags for every country in the world (as officially defined by ISO3166-1), which can be used to ‘geo-filter’ the map ie. show only those branches tagged with a particular ‘geographic location.
Background to how we got here...
The origins of why we create the knowledge maps that we do lies in the technique of ‘mind mapping‘, popularised in the 1970’s & 80’s by British popular psychology author and broadcaster Tony Buzan, and the ‘mindmapping software’ that first appeared in the 1990’s to do it on desktop computers, of which MindManager (our software of choice) has always been the market leader, but has evolved to do so, so much more….
The technique of ‘Mindmapping‘ was originally pioneered by Tony Buzan in the 1970’s & 80’s (though the use of diagrams that visually ‘map’ information using branching and radial tree maps traces back centuries). It is a manual, graphical (ie. using coloured pens and paper) way of capturing, storing and working with your own knowledge and thoughts that works in harmony with the way your brain actually processes and stores it – that is in ‘branching’ chains of associated concepts (literally ‘chains of thought’).
The Power of a Mind to Map: Tony Buzan at TEDxSquareMile (Dec 18, 2012) [19:35]
How to Mind Map with Tony Buzan [4:59]
In the creation of a ‘mind map’ knowledge is not captured ‘linearly’ in traditional lines, paragraphs and pages of text, but instead in discrete words and associated images, arranged around the central idea, connected together by radiating branch lines that show the hierarchical inter-relationships between them.
This forms a branching structure, radiating out from the centre, which is why they are also known as ‘tree diagrams‘. Text is minimal, a few words only that encapsulate the concept or idea, but this is supplemented by the use of different colours, pictures, shapes and symbols so that the mindmap engages the whole brain, both in creating it and reading it.
The power of the mindmapping process is that, because your brain can literally see your thoughts and the relationships between them in front it as a picture, it can’t help but think of other thoughts and connections, which once added to the map, spark yet more thoughts and so on in a positive feedback loop.
Thus a mind map is both a fundamental ingredient in the mental thought process, as well as a physical, tangible by-product of it.
Given the popularity of the mindmapping technique (especially in the worlds of Education and Business), but the physical limitations placed on it through using a sheet of paper and pens, by the 1990’s it was only a matter of time before somebody wrote a software program to create mindmaps on a desktop personal computer (well there weren’t any other kinds of personal computer back then, right kids? ;-).
MindManager was one of the first (version 1 was released in 1994 under the name ‘MindMan’), but this was followed by a handful more by the 2000’s (including Tony’s own iMindMap, which was used to create the above map), and now there are dozens and dozens and it’s a very crowded ‘software space’ (though all are not created equal, as we will see in the next section).
What Software Adds To The MindMapping Process
MindMapping software overcomes some of the physical limitations of the traditional, analog process, but also adds fundamental abilities that were not conceived of in the original scope and design of mind mapping, which came from a pre-personal computing age…
It's A Digital Document
And so, just like any other digital file, a digital mindmap can be stored and shared and archived and retrieved and re-worked on and everything else…
Unlimited Editing & Re-arrangement Of Contents 'On The Hoof'
Digital maps can be endlessly amended, edited and rearranged within the software ‘on the hoof’ as they are being created. This is at best problematic on paper, if not completely impossible once the main structure of the map has been committed to. In other words digital maps can be changed “at the speed of thought”.
Infinite Canvas
Unlike a sheet of paper, the canvas in mindmap software has no edge. Thus it is possible to literally follow and record a complete ‘chain of thought’ without the mental disruption of worrying about running out of space.
Infinite Hierarchical Levels
Likewise there is no limit to the number of levels of sub-branches that can be added to the map. Furthermore at any level in the hierarchy, the software allows you to collapse the sub-branches below so you can’t see them, and then expand them out again so you can. Thus it is possible to record effectively unlimited amounts of information down to the finest level of detail, but to hide the detail from view until required so that just the upper branches – which outline the ‘big picture’ about the central topic in question – can still be seen in one view.
More 'Visual Channels' For Capturing Information
There are additional ways that information can be embedded within, or attached to, the branches of a digital mindmap, over and above the ‘traditional’, immediately visible text and images, such as… Notes attached to the branch (which can be at least an infinite amount of text and sometimes tables and images). Hyperlinks ‘attached’ to a branch can take the viewer anywhere on the internet, or a file on the computer, when ‘clicked’. Index Markers ‘attached’ to a branch can ‘tag’ it with contextual knowledge.
From Initial Thoughts & Ideas, Through Plan Of Action To Completed Deliverable
In todays ‘information-age society’ almost everything we do in terms of work is digital – creating, consuming and sharing a lot of information on a daily basis in order to do whatever is we want to do. Mindmapping software is an ideal digital tool to do all that in the one environment. From defining the problem / project, through brainstorming a solution (how the problem will be solved / deciding on the project content), to a plan of action to deliver it (who is doing what, by when, with the resources available), to a dashboard that is visually telling you if everything is going according to plan!
The key thing to note – and this is one of the ‘killer applications’ of mindmapping software that saves you time and makes business processes so much more efficient – is that the final map produced by the end of each stage, is re-purposed as the starting point of the next one.
As you can see ‘mindmapping’ software goes way beyond the manual, paper-based technique of ‘mindmapping’ as envisaged by Tony Buzan. It is a hugely versatile digital tool that enables users to do a lot of the everyday digital stuff they have to do anyway, but much quicker, easier and efficiently, allowing them to stay more in control of the whole information capturing, understanding and sharing process.
Anyway as ‘mindmapping software’ became popular, there was heated debate amongst mindmapping advocates as to whether or not mindmaps created by compter software were ‘real mindmaps’ according to the rules of Tony Buzan. However we have never been much vexed by this academic argument because, as cartographers, we could see the exciting possibilities that mindmapping software offered for the mapping of any sort of ‘knowledge space’. Not just abstract thoughts and ideas generated inside your brain, but also tangible things that exist in the real world (often in hierarchical relationships), and the knowledge resources about them that exist in the online public domain.
MindManager software has always been about more than just mindmapping on computer. It has always had a business focus (often describing itself as “the missing piece of Microsoft Office), lending itself to everyday tasks that individuals and teams in organisations need to do – brainstorming, project planning, task lists etc.
When we first started using MindManager over 20 years ago it was for those classic business mapping uses, and it soon became our ‘go to digital tool of first resort’ for working with any sort of information. However we were always struck by the similarities in the processes of mapping ‘business information’, and the traditional ‘geographic information’ mapping we had hitherto been involved with.
And so began our development of MindManager as an information cartography tool, capable of ‘visually capturing’ pretty much any ‘space’ of human interest and endeavour (be it physical, virtual, conceptual or whatever) in a single ‘map’ (ie. a visually structured document), or series of inter-linked maps. Not just the ‘things’ that occupy the space, and the spatial inter-relashionships between them, but also the man knowledge resources about each ‘thing’ that already existed about them in the public domain, and the links to those resources.
Even though many other ‘mind mapping’ tools have emerged into what is now a very crowded space over the years, both ‘standalone’ software or an ‘online service’, MindManger remains our main knowledge mapping tool. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly it has always grown as the wider technology has (eg. the integration with first Microsoft SharePoint and now Teams). Secondly – and this is the most important one – no other software has such a wide variety of ‘visual channels’ to attach / embed information in a map. Most of these features are unique to MindManager and it is these that we use to take our ‘information cartography’ to the next level. You can find out more about these on the Knowledge Mappers website, but here are the main ones…
Wide Variety of Map Layout Styles (even at individual branch level)
Not only does MindManager offer an unrivalled number of different map layouts – ‘traditional’ (radiating from the centre) mindmap, organisation chart, timeline etc. – the layout of individual branches & sub-branches can be separately styled, no matter where they are in the hierarchy.
Big Maps, With 1000's Of Branches & Even More Hyperlinks
MindManager maps can have 1000’s of branches without affecting the software ‘performance’. The biggest one we have created so far had 20,000+ branches. This has been enough for us to knowledge map the solar system, and all the countries of the world in a single map. Thus we can be fairly confident that we can map all the ‘things’ in a space before we start!
Variably Formatted ('Rich') Branch Text
By being able to variably format individual elements within the text of a single branch, we can create visual hierarchies for the different components. This means the text string can contain a greater amount of more diverse information, without visually overwhelming the viewer eg. including unique identifying codes (taken from official sources) as well as the name.
Multiple Hyperlinks On A Single Branch
MindManager has the unique ability to attach multiple hyperlinks to a single map branch. This means that…
1) maps need fewer branches so are less visually cluttered;
2) a single branch can become a mini knowledge portal in it’s own right;
3) links to core knowledge resources can remain with the branch when it’s re-used in other maps (whether or not it’s the key focus of that map).
4) a map with 1000’s of branches, can contain many more 1000’s of hyperlinks!
Embedded Single Data Cells ('Topic Properties')
Multiple data fields (akin to single cells in a spreadsheet) can be embedded within a branch and is another way of adding contextual facts & figures to the map. Also the field values can be used to visually format the individual branch eg. if the value is greater than a particular number then make the branch text / fill this colour, or this shape (this is equivelant to ‘thematic mapping’ in GIS)…
HTML Export
MindManager has the unique ability to export maps as HTML5 (.html) files. These retain all the content – and most of the interactivity – of the original eg. they can be interactively queried by filtering using index marker tags to hide / show / highlight the coresponding branches. And, just like any other html file, they can be…
1) viewed by anybody, in any modern internet browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safara etc.), on or offline (once downloaded), on any device;
2) shared by email or file sharing services (eg. DropBox);
3) published online as stand-alone web pages, such that they have their own URL (which can be shared), or even embedded within existing pages (and hosted somewhere else eg. the aforementioned URL).
This means that anybody can view the knowledge maps we create, they don’t need to have MindMaanger software (unless they want to amend or re-use the content).
Anyway as you can see MindManager software really does enable us to take knowledge mapping to the next level….
We seriously began using MindManager – the world’s best information mapping software – as a business information mapping tool back in 2002 (see above). However we soon realised that the MindManager maps we were now creating, and the geographic maps that we created and worked with every day (Knowledge Mappers started out as a consultancy offering geographic information mapping & spatial analysis services), had many characteristics in common….
Both are their own type of visual knowledge format
Maps are a type of visual knowledge format in their own right. By ‘visual knowledge’ we mean that they capture and encode data / information / knowledge within them as visual elements (‘pictures’ at their simplest) that convey said to the viewer visually rather than as text that they have to first understand the words of, and then interpret their meaning.
Sure you could use words to start describing a map, but you would soon tie yourself up in knots – where do you even start? Do you describe every ‘thing’, or just the most important ‘things’? Do you describe the relationships between ‘the thing’ and every ‘other thing’, or just the ‘adjacent things’ round about it? And is that description absolute in terms of distance, or relative in terms of position? And isn’t it just easier to draw a picture?
Both map 'the things' that together define 'a space'
At it’s simplest ‘a map’ is a visually structured index of what ‘things’ together define a particular ‘space’, and the inter-relationships between them within ‘the space’.
Geographic maps depict ‘geographic (ie. ‘real world’) space’ and the ‘geographic things’ that exist within it…
- Topographic features – these define the physical landscape within which we humand exist eg. rivers, coastlines, mountains, valleys, forests etc.),
- Human geographic features – these are all man-made and exist in the ‘real world’, but some are ‘physically tangible’ (eg. settlements, roads, fields etc.), whilst some just exist as ‘lines on a map’ and so are purely ‘conceptual’, even though they may be vital to the running of a human society (eg. administrative / electoral / public service delivery areas etc.).
In a MindManager map the space is always ‘conceptual’ (ie. it exists in our ‘brain space’), and the branches are the ‘things’ that define the ‘conceptual space’. Traditionally the ‘conceptual things’ in mindmaps are of an individual’s ‘thoughts’ and ‘ideas’ about a particular subject, however we realised that they was no reason why they couldn’t also be about ‘real world things’ – say the aforementioned ‘human geaographic things’.
*LIGHTBULB MOMENT*
Both map the relationships between 'the things' that together define 'the space'
Professionally produced geographic maps are a visual record of the recorded locations of ‘the geographic things’ within the mapped ‘geographic space’. Geographic locations can be defined in 2 ways, each of which in turn enable the spatial inter-relationships between ‘the things’ to be described in different ways…
- absolutely using numeric co-ordinate systems to locate them in at least 2 (if not 3) dimensional ‘real world’ space. This is what makes a ‘geographic map’ a true scale drawing of the geographic space, from which we can quantitavely answer queries like ‘how far apart are these 2 ‘point things’ from each other’, ‘how much do these 2 ‘area things’ overlap? etc.
- relatively with respect to each other, from which we can derive qualititative logical relationships like ‘beside’, ‘connected to’, ‘overlaps with’, ‘contained enirely within’, ‘is a sub-division of’ etc.
Where the relatively defined relationships between ‘the things’ within ‘a space’ are logical and hierarchical, they can also be captured in a MindManager map.
The classic logical tree diagram map for a ‘conceptual human space’ is an organisation chart, which shows the different divisions and sub-divisions of an organisation, and who is in charge of who. However it is surprising how often that the ‘things’ that make up our everyday ‘human geography space’ have hierachical inter-relationships. For example the ‘Countries of the World’ are arranged into macro geographic sub-regions and regions for official statistical purposes by the United Nations, whilst also being made up of sub-national divisions like states, counties and communities. It is through all these administrative areas that the afairs of the human race are usually organised and run…
*ANOTHER LIGHBULB MOMENT*
Both use cartographic principles and devices to create a visual structure & language
A map encodes & conveys information visually, but crucially does so in a logical, structured way using the art & science of cartography, which uses cartographic principles & devices such as….
- visual hierachies – more visually prominent things (bigger, bolder etc.) are more important.
- lines – can show relationships between things – equivelant to, subdivision of, border between etc.
- shapes – points, lines and areas (polygons) etc.
- symbols – these could be literal depictions or visual metaphors.
- colours – meaningful, eye-catching, complementary, contrasting etc.
All these are in conjunction with a minimal amount of text – which is usually in the form of brief labels of said points, lines and areas – which too are visually formatted using the same cartographic devices.
Together all these elements create a visually structured, cartographic framework (‘language’) of knowledge elements that…
- more actively engage with the viewers brains than a linearly structured, text-only knowledge resource does, and so it is more easily navigated, understood and assimilated (as per mindmapping principles – see above).
- can be replicated when creating other maps to establish a common visual knowledge framework & language for capturing and working with different sets of data / information / knowledge that occupy the same ‘conceptual space’ (which as we say could still be ‘real world space’).
Both can be built up in layers of related 'things'
Most of us at some point have taken a geographic map and drawn our own information on top of it to quickly transfer our geographic knowledge to others or for it to be transfered to us – eg. ‘the route’ for new friends to get to our house, or for us to get from the hotel we’ve never stayed in before to the museum we’ve never visited before. In the old days it was by drawing a line on a paper map, but Google Maps showing you the ‘routes’ between the 2 points as coloured lines on your mobile phone screen is still the same priniple.
And that principle is that the starting geographic map is acting as a ‘basemap’ knowledge layer upon which additional layers of more specialised knowledge (eg. ‘the route’) are added. These additional layers are proper ‘layers in the information system’ in their own right, but without the visual context provided by the underlying basemap layers (which place them in a bigger picture / real world space, that is familiar to the viewer) they would be difficult for a viewer to understand, especially without any exisiting ‘local knowledge’. For example ‘a route’ is just a line on a piece of paper (or screen) if it doesn’t reference ‘things’ in ‘geographic space’ – a starting location, a destination location and named roads in between.
Similarly we can think of each level in the branch hierarchy of a MindManager map as additional layers of ‘related things’, each building on the previous layer. This is the basis of our series of Countries of the World knowledge atlas maps (see below).
*ANOTHER LIGHTBULB MOMENT*
Both are physical - and therefore archivable - knowledge artefacts
Geographic maps have 2 lives…
- The first is as a ‘living / working document’ that shows ‘the space’ and the ‘things’ that define it ‘now’ (or at least the date of publication).
- However the world moves on, ‘things’ change, ‘spaces’ change, and so the maps of them have to be updated so that they still reflect the latest situation ‘in the real world’. It is then that the original map becomes a historical record of what ‘things’ made up ‘the space’ at that particular point in time.
In the age of paper geographic maps this cycle of ‘survey, publish and archive’ was usually infrequent, due to the expense of manual field survey methodoligies, but also the fact that the pace of change of the real world was not that fast. Superceded maps were physically archived in map libraries (just like the books in the rest of the library) so they could be still be available to future generations to consult.
However in the digital age the whole process happens much quicker. Field surveyors use digital tools and upload their data to a central spatial database there and then, where it may be augmented with data gathered using remote sensing techniques (from satellites, planes and drones). Online mapping services like Google Maps ‘assemble on demand’ the maps they display to the viewer from the objects in the spatial database, so they always ‘serve up’ the most current picture. Thus unless the underlying digital data is shared, a ‘Google Map’ isn’t a ‘map type artefact’ that can be archived.
By definition MindManger maps too are digital, however they are saved as a physical software file, which can be copied, stored locally and/or centraly, and archived.
In other words we could replicate ‘traditional maps of geographic space’ in a MindManager map – well at least it coud be a visually structured record of the ‘geographic things’ that define a single ‘geographic space’ along with the hierarchical relationships between them.
So we realised that it may be possible to use MindManager to map ‘geographic space’. Yes it would be in a more limited way compared to some aspects of a ‘traditional geographic map’, however we could use mindmapping principles and MindManager’s amazing ‘information cartography’ tools to take other aspects much, much further. For example…
- incorporating hyperlinks to multiple online, public domain knowledge resources about each of the ‘geographic things’ – be they ‘official’, ‘definitive’ or just ‘plain old useful’ 🙂 – by attaching them to the map branch that represents that ‘thing’.
- incorporating core contextual knowledge about each of the ‘geographic things’ – gleaned from those now linked to online resources – using MindManager’s many information cartography tools – embedded elements like images (such as geographic maps), spreadsheet tables & charts, and single data cells; and attached elements like notes and index marker tags.
That in fact we could create a knowledge atlas (ie. a knowledge map about real world geographic things)…
But how did we actually do it? How do we get from a ‘traditional geographic map of countries of the world’, to a ‘knowledge atlas of countries of the world’?
Well it’s all about those inter-relationships between the geographic building blocks (ie. the countries) that make up a space (ie. the world), as it is mapping these in MindManager that will create the fundamental, inter-connected framework of map branches.
But in order to do that, we need to know….
- What are all the ‘Countries of the World’ (each ‘country’ will be represented by one branch only in the map)?
- What are the hierarchical relationships between them (which will define how those branches are best arranged within the map)?
As we’ll see below, the answers to these are officially defined in downloadable data tables & spreadsheets, which can be easily imported into MindManager as a starting point….
ISO3166-1 - The definitive list of 'Countries of the World'
So it turns out the official list (or ‘register’) of the ‘Countries of the World’ is the international standard ISO3166 – ‘Codes for the representation of names of countries and their subdivisions’. This can be found on the International Standards Organisation (ISO)’s website, with the actual data table on the ISO online browing platform. (Though as ISO point out they are only responsible for maintaining the coding system of unique letters and/or numbers – so that countries and their subdivisions can be referred to in a completely unambiguous way that transcends language barriers – whilst the names come from official United Nations sources.)
UN Geoscheme - ISO3166-1 Countries grouped into Macro geographic regions & sub-regions
There are many ways of arranging the ‘Countiries of the World’ into related groups and sub-groups, but the main official (but not only) schema for grouping them together geographically into macro-geographic regions and sub-regions is the United Nations Geoscheme (or M49 Statistical Standard), devised by the UN to consistently collect and aggregate country based statistics to try and keep track of what’s going on in this big old crazy world of ours.
Thus it is the UN Geoscheme that officially defines the hierarchical inter-relationships between the official ‘Countries of the World’, and it’s those that our MindManager map will capture as a network of knowledge seed branches – one for each country, region and sub-region – inter-connected by relationship lines to create the hierarchy and so define ‘the space’.
And so now we’ve tracked down this definitive data source, we can get cracking….
Turning the Geoscheme data table into a basic MindManager map
Turning an existing data table into a map is where MindManager comes into it’s own, providing several ways of ‘getting it into the system’…
- Manual – highlight, drag and drop (or copy and paste) the data from the source into where you want it to go on the map (ideal for data capture ‘on the hoof’).
- Automated – import the spreadsheet or .csv file directly into MindManager with the Excel Mapping Tool (or link it to a database).
The choice is yours, but personally speaking, as with mindmapping, there’s nothing like the physical process of creating a knowledge map with your own hands to really improve your understanding of the subject, especially from a base knowledge of zero.
Anyway once that’s done, we now have our basic MindManager map – a ‘tree diagram’ network of branches (one for each country, region and sub-region), inter-connected by relationship lines to visually define the hierarchy.
So now that we have our basic MindManager map – a ‘tree diagram’ network of branches (one for each country, region and sub-region), inter-connected by relationship lines to visually define the hierarchy – how do we transform it into our Countries of the World Knowledge Atlas?
Turning the basic MindManager map into a Knowledge Atlas
So what does this basic MindManager map lack that we will have to add to create our Knowledge Atlas map? Well….
- Links to official / definitive / plain old useful multiple knowledge resources about each country, grouped into ‘collections’.
- Visual knowledge elements embedded / attached to the branches to add contextual knowledge and utility.
- Integration of all these together in country / region knowledge seed branches, each of which is a mini knowlkedge portal in it’s wn right.
- Everything tied together in a visually appealling but still structured way that ‘packs a lot in’ but doesn’t immediately overwhelm the user.
In other words what is required is a lot of detective work and application of cartographic ‘know how’….
Incorporating links to knowledge resources about the country / region into the map
In order to include links to official / definitive / plain old useful public domain knowledge resources about the ‘Countries of the World’ in our map, we first need to track them down ourselves wherever they are in the online public domain (what we call ‘going on a knowledge safari’ :-).
This may seem like a daunting task, but actually we’ve already ‘got one in the bag’ in the form of the original ISO online platform listing all the countries that are part of the ISO3166-1 standard, as each one has it’s own listing page (eg. this one for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland).
And as we’ve said, the GeoScheme schema was devised by the United Nations for country-level data gathering, so it’s no surpirse that each country and region has a data page on the UNdata portal – so that’s 2 knowledge resource links. (Actually it’s quite a lot more as once you look deeper you will find they also have pages on the websites of many of the UN family of organisations, but that’s for later :-).
And then of course there’s Wikipedia, because in this day and age just about everything important has it’s own page (or even it’s own category) on Wikipedia (the corollary being if it’s not on Wikipedia, is it even important? – discuss ;-)….
And then there’s all the external links referenced to in the Wikipedia page….
And possibly sister sites to Wikipedia, like the Wikivoyage site for travellers….
And then there’s all the ones we can find with a browser and a Google search bar (other search engines are available ;-)….
Of course before they’re added to the final map all these links have to be….
- assessed for quality before adding.
- ‘tidied up’ and cartographically improved after adding.
- arranged into logical collections (eg. ‘General knowledge’, ‘Geographic knowledge’ etc.)
However once that is done…
- we can explore them ourselves to find useful contextual knowledge to incorporate within the map (which in turn might lead to more knowledge resources to include).
- for the end user they become both more easily discoverable within the ‘bigger picture’ context of the whole map, and more easily accessible as they are only ever no more than a couple of mouse clicks away.
Thus as well as being a visually structured index of knowledge resources about the ‘things’ in the ‘space’, our knowledge map is now also a portal to those resources.
Incorporating contextual knowledge gleaned from the 'linked to' resources as visual knowledge elements
Using MindManager’s many unique ‘information cartography’ features (see above), some of the core information contained in the linked to resources could be embedded within, or attached to, the indiividual seed branches in the map as one or more knowledge elements….
Outline Shape – This may convey knowledge about some aspect of the subject of the branch. For example for branches representing geographic areas, the outline shape indicates the nature of its’ borders with neighbouring areas with respect to the sea…
CIRCLE = all coastal borders (ie. ‘island(s)’)
HEXAGON = all land borders (ie. ‘land-locked’)
ROUNDED RECTANGLE = mixed coastal & Land borders
Fill Colour – Sometimes the colour filling a branch conveys knowledge eg. a particular political party.
Image [Embedded] – Images provide a unique visual element that users can instantly ‘latch onto’ as they navigate their way around the map. So such things as….
- screenshots of actual geographic maps (eg.thumbnail location maps),
- flags
- icons
- people (eg. profile pictures)
- logos
- etc.
Text – Thanks to MindManager’s unique ability to handle ‘rich’ text – the ability to variably format individual chatracters within a single text ‘string’ – we can pack several different pieces of ‘core knowledge’ – such as names & unique identifying codes (taken from official sources) – into the text of a single branch without it visually overwhelming the user.
Note [Attached] – A branch note can contain all the elements of a word processed page – variably formatted (‘rich’) text, links, tables and images, and so is an ideal place for supplementary information that would otherwise add visual clutter to the map.
Data Elements [Embedded] – MindManager has 2 unique ways to add contextual ‘facts & figures’ (i.e. text and number fields) to individual branches so that they are visible to the user (though only one can be used on any given branch at one time)…
Spreadsheet Table / Chart – A branch specific spreadsheet table created using MindManager’s spreadshet tool (i.e. not referencing cells in a ‘normal’ spreadsheet file stored elsewhere), with all the usual functionality available. If the data content is structured appropriately, it can be toggled between ‘table’ and ‘chart’ view (though this view is ‘fixed’ when the map is exported to create the HTML version).
Multiple Single Data Fields – These are like single cells in a spreadsheet and the values – which can be text or numeric – can be used to visually format the branch using MindManager’s Smart Rules feature.
Index Marker Tags [Attached] – Arranged in groups and added to individual branches as appropriate, index marker tags add visible contextual knowledge, enable map filtering to show / hide only those branches with specified tags, and enable internal map navigation.
Multiple Hyperlinks [Attached] – Another unique feature, multiple links to a range of official / definitive / plain old useful knowledge resources attached to the seed branch – usually selected from the full range of general & geographic knowledge resource collections – help turn the map into a knowledge portal without adding to the visual clutter.
In practice these processes are not sequential but organically iterative – one feeds into the other, which then feeds back into that and so it goes on (like the Mindmapping process described earlier, but unlike that it is constrained by what is actually out there in the real world).
Anyway we hope you agree that the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts 🙂
You can find out more about the details of the knowledge map making process in the ‘About – The Process’ section of this website.
Intrigued, we applied the same technique to the humble calendar – the atlas for ‘time space’ – and, to cut a slightly shorter research & development story short – our calendar knowledge maps were born…
(These also crossed over to the ‘geographic space’ when we added links to the national days of every country of the world, as well as calendars for specific countries…)
Thinking further we realised there’s plenty of ‘things’ in the world of human endeavour that are real, and important, and have hierarchical (and other) inter-relationship with other real, and important, things….
- organisations from governments (national to local) and public bodies, to corporations to community groups, to informal networks
- in fact networks, people and organisations of any type and the ‘spaces’, economic spaces. Such spaces can’t be mapped geographically, or even if they can, mapping them only geographically doesn’t add much to our practical knowledge about them. An ‘organisation map’ is an obvious example of such a non-geographic knowledge map.
In fact we soon realised that, using this new visual mapping technique , we could map pretty much capture any ‘space’ of human interest and endeavour – be it physical, virtual, conceptual or whatever – as a MindManager map…
In these days of information overload we also realised that our knowledge maps could help people – and the teams, organisations and communities of which they are part – more quickly and easily answer the basic questions about ‘the spaces’ that they spend a lot of their time & resources trying to find answers to…
- What are the important ‘things’ that make up this ‘space’ we are interested in?
- What is the ‘spatial’ / hierarchical relationship between them?
- What do we know about them?
- Where are those knowledge resources to be found?
- How do we access them now – and in the future – so we can use them to benefit our organisation / community / project?
By discovering & accessing the knowledge they need more quickly (and with a lot less stress :-), they could spend their precious (and usually limited) time & resources actually utilisng it to do what they need to do, rather than scrolling through endless search results (assuming they knew what to look for in the first place of course).
Anybody with access to MindManager software can use our knowledge maps as ‘ready made’ templates to amend, adapt & repurpose (in whole or in part) in their own projects, so they do not have to re-invent the knowledge wheel each time.
However thanks to MindManager’s unique HTML export capabilities, the HTML versions of our knowledge maps can be accessed by anybody using any modern browser, on any device, on or offline, without the need for any plugins ie. everybody!
And so we opened our digital download map store so that anybody can benefit from the ‘universdally useful’ knowledge maps of our world we create, and began offering our knowledge mapping services to map ‘spaces’ on behalf of clients as well as help them to do it for themselves…
Map Facts
Here are some of the ‘fun facts’ 😉 about the Scottish Parliament’s 8 Electoral Regions, 73 Constituencies & 129 (56 regional & 73 Constituency) Elected Members (MSPs) that we have discovered (and embedded!) during the process of creating this map…
Geographic Area (Regn)
Smallest & Largest
Glasgow Region
Highlands and Islands Region
Area Per MSP (Regn)
Smallest & Largest
Glasgow Region
Highlands and Islands Region
Geographic Area (Cons)
Smallest & Largest
Glasgow Kelvin Consituency
Caithness, Sutherland and Ross Constituency
Political Balance
ALL, Regional and Constituency MSPs
ALL MSP's
(129 MSP's)
MPs - SNP: 61 LDP: 5 Lab: 24 Grn: 6 Con: 13 Oth (Ind): 2
Constituency MSP's
(73 MSP's)
MPs - SNP: 57 LDP: 4 Lab: 3 Grn: 0 Con: 7 Oth (Ind): 2
Majority
Smallest & Largest
Edinburgh Central Consituency [Con]
Aberdeen Donside Constituency [Ind (ex SNP)]
Regional ('List') MSP's
(56 MSP's)
MPs - SNP: 4 LDP: 1 Lab: 21 Grn: 6 Con: 24 Oth (Ind): 0
Gender Balance
ALL, Regional and Constituency MSPs
ALL MSP's
(129 MSP's)
MPs - ALL: 129 Female: 47 Male: 82
Constituency MSP's
(73 MSP's)
MPs - ALL: 73 Female: 28 Male: 45
Regional ('List') MSP's
(56 MSP's)
MPs - ALL: 56 Female: 19 Male: 37
Map Features
We take full advantage of MindManager’s many unique ‘information cartography’ features when creating our unique maps so we can pack in 1000’s of ‘bits’ of knowledge into a single, visually structured, intuitive to navigate document that can be easily shared. Here are the main features of this UK Parliament Scottish Constituencies & Members Polticial Knowledge Atlas (5 Nov 2019) …
Big Map With 100's Of Branches & Links And Capacity For Plenty More
With 2,950 knowledge resource links over 1,763 branches, this map is a useful, contextual knowledge resource in it’s own right, as well as being a visually structured ndex of the best definitive / official / plain old useful knowledge resources available in the public domain about the subject. Thanks to MindManager’s unique capabilities it has plenty of spare capacity for further content to be added in the future.
Main Branches Create Robust Visual Framework For 'Seed Branches'
The 1st & 2nd level branches form the main (‘org-tree’) visual framework within which the map content of interest sits. As everything nests into electoral regions, the 1st level are summary branches for each arranged alphabetically from left to right, with an additional ‘all regions as a whole’ summary branch. The 2nd level sub-branches are summary branches for the regional level results and members, and for the constituencies. There are approximately the same number of MSPs and constituencies in each region so each main branch is of a similar depth.
Visually Rich 'General Knowledge Seed' Branch For Each Of The 73 Scottish Parliament Constituencies
The 2nd level branches are political ‘knowledge seed points’ for individual United Kingdom Parliament constituencies. They contain the name & official constituency identifier codes in variably formatted (‘rich’) text, and a thumbnail location map image to aid user navigation and provide spatial context. This is supplemented by the variation in topic shape, which indicates the status of the borders with neighbouring electoral wards – all coastlal (ie. island), mixed or all land (ie. landlocked). There is also a table of the results by party for the most recent (half dozen or so) General Elections & by-elections, coloured by party, as well as multiple hyperlinks to public domain general, geographic & electoral knowledge resources about the constituency. The full list of knowledge embedded within, and attached to, this seed topic is given in the map summary above.
Embedded Spreadsheet Contains All Election Results For The Region and Constituency So Far
Data features embedded within seed branches – like spreadsheets, charts & data fields (another unique MindManager feature) – provide another ‘channel’ of knowlegde that adds context to the more detailed knowledge contained in the public domain resources linked to in the map. The embedded spreadsheets are a table of the results by party for all the Scottish General Elections & by-elections in the constituency, coloured by party, showing the results for each party candidate, the turnout, and the majority of the winning candidate are also recorded (Regional results show votes and number of MSPs elected). The colouring by party gives a simple ‘at a glance’ recent electoral history of the constituency, whilst the attached multiple hyperlinks to electoral knowledge resources will provide more detail as required. The full list of data embedded within this seed topic is given in the map summary above.
Visually Rich 'General Knowledge Seed' Branch For Each Of The 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs)
The 3rd level branches are ‘knowledge seed points’ for individual members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs), coloured by their political party allegiance. They contain the members name suffixed by ‘MSP’ and their party allegiance in brackets, as well as a thumbnail of their official portrait picture. Their constituency names are also included to make it easier to keep track of ‘who’s who and where’s where’ when many MSP branches are open on screen at one time. Embedded data fields show the MP’s majorities when elected for the constituency. There are also multiple hyperlinks to public domain knowledge resources about the MSP, including their official register of interests. The full list of knowledge embedded within, and attached to, this seed topic is given in the map summary above.
Embedded Data Fields Show MSP's Previous Electoral Victories
Data features embedded within seed branches – like spreadsheets, charts & data fields (another unique MindManager feature) – provide another ‘channel’ of knowlegde that adds context to the more detailed knowledge contained in the public domain resources linked to in the map. The data fields embedded in the MSP seed topic show their previous electoral victories in the mixed member proportional representation (MMP) system – in a ‘first past the post’ constituency or ‘on the list’ in one of the additional member regions. The full list of data embedded within this seed topic is given in the map summary above.
Attached Multiple Hyperlinks To Public Domain Knowledge Resources
Seed Branches have multiple hyperlinks attached to them (yet another unique feature of MindManager maps), which link to the best definitive / official / plain old useful knowledge resources available in the public domain about the subject. The ‘definable link text’ gives clarty as to the resource being linked to (which can be very variable if left to the default). As well as increasing the amount of knowledge that can be ‘squeezed’ into a map without increasing the ‘visual clutter’ of additional branches, it means these links can be retained if the seed branches are used in other maps, or this map is re-purposed. The full list of multiple knowledge resource hyperlinks attached to the seed topics in this map is given in the map summary above.
Index Marker Tag Groups Enable 'Geo Intelligent' & Other Map Filtering
Branches in the map may be tagged with one or more ‘index markers’ from one or more ‘marker groups’. These enable intelligent map filtering and quick navigation. Many of the tags are ‘geographic’ in nature such that branches are tagged with ‘where’ they are – eg. administrative or electoral areas. This gives the map in-built ‘spatial intelligence’ and the ability to be ‘geo-filtered’. (MindManager software users can copy and paste any of the marker groups in any other maps). The full list of index marker tags attached to the seed topics in this map is given in the map summary above.
Sub-Branch Collections Of Single Links To Public Domain Knowledge Resources
The Scottish Parliament Members (MSPs) sub-branch link collections – each with a single hyperlink to official / definitive / at least practical & useful online knowledge resources – are grouped into related collections for ‘Official Parliamentary’, ‘Official Party/MSP Controlled’ and ‘Externally Controlled’ knowledge resources. These are starting points for knowledge discovery and subsequent more detailed (‘desktop’) research. (MindManager software users have the advantage of being able to add to these branches as they go). The full list of links in the sub-branch collections attached to this seed branch is given in the map summary above.
