All the development work we’re currently doing is designed to allow users to share data and map visualisations with colleagues and stakeholders. We’re automating that process by which you call someone over to look at something on your screen – together with the process of gathering the comments they make. A hotspot (or coolspot) on a map often prompts someone with local knowledge to say, “Oh, I know that road, it’s different from the next street because…”

This qualitative knowledge makes sense of the quantitative evidence and often contains the insights you need to make a decision based on the findings. The more people you involve, the more reliable the consensus findings become.

Here’s an example of a visually distinct correlation between two datasets for Great Manchester which needs some local qualitative knowledge. We were thinking about this week’s debate over the status of some qualifications being downgraded in school league tables, and whether employment data could indicate any relationship between school attainment and the value delivered back to the surrounding community.

In an exploratory way, we looked at data for the city for residents with level 4 qualifications and above (level 4 is one higher than A levels, e.g. diplomas, professional certificates, on up to HNDs, degrees, masters and so on). Almost accidentally, we compared this city-scale data pattern with residents employed in manufacturing. The two maps are below:

Percent residents with level 4 qualifications & above (darkest shades = 30%+)

Percent residents employed in manufacturing (darkest shades 20%+)

If we image a slice of pie extending south from the centre of the city, the lack of manufacturing employment and the relatively high level of qualification is visually evident (and yes, Moss Side is a blob in the middle of the pie slice – but the inverse relationship between the two phenomena seems consistent even here). The tools we’re building allow you to add markers and annotations to illustrate something exactly like this, but we’ll have to make do with pie for now.

So does manufacturing still offer relatively high levels of employment to those workers with qualifications below level 4, as we might have expected 30 years ago perhaps? Or is it more significant that higher-qualified people are disproportionately likely to live south of the centre and be employed in the service sector?

With more and better data, could we test the hypothesis that qualifications relevant to manufacturing and other local employers would add even greater value to the community than traditional academic exams – perhaps in the shape of a reduced benefits budget and related regeneration effects?

The truthful answer here and now is that I don’t know, but I bet among the residents of Manchester and equivalent cities the ‘soft’ knowledge exists to make perfect sense of these patterns, once we know they’re there, and to shape policy accordingly.

Any insight to share? Let us know below. Meanwhile it’s back to the coding coalface…