Anna Barford

Anna Barford Room number: E14
Telephone (internal): 27956
Telephone (UK): 0114 222 7956
Telephone (International): +44 114 222 7956
Email: Anna.Barford@Sheffield.ac.uk

Anna has a BA in Geography, from the University of Cambridge (2004). She has a MA in Research Methods (Sociology) from the University of Nottingham (2005). Anna has worked as a Research Assistant in the Department of Geography at the University of Leeds; interned in the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation Head Quarters in Geneva; and undertaken independent research into participatory 'development' projects in Nepal.

Anna has worked in the Geography Department at the University of Sheffield since November 2005. She is a Research Associate working in the Social and Spatial Inequalities (SASI) Group.

Research

Anna works on a world-mapping project, which uses cartograms to show the worldwide distribution of hundreds of variables, including health, poverty, education, trade, pollution and violence. These maps and accompanying information are freely available at: http://www.worldmapper.org

Her main roles for this project are to write much of the explanatory text on the website, create educational posters of world maps, and source some of the data needed to draw these maps (usually from United Nations agencies). She also promotes these maps in the public sphere, through presentations and articles, and working with the media.

Research Interests

Later this year Anna plans to start doctoral work into understandings and interpretations of international inequalities. The abstract to this research reads as follows:

"The life chances of people living in one place are not unrelated to those of people living elsewhere. As such, it is informative to see how parts of the world fit together. A world mapping project, which uses cartograms to visualise international distributions of many variables, effectively shows inequalities between people living in different parts of the world. This proposed research is to find out how people in different parts of the world perceive their own and others´ social, economic and geographical positions, and their connections to others. Interviews with people in various social, economic and geographical positions will be based around interpretations and explanations of these cartograms. The research will also address why people explain the world as they do."

Presentations

  • GeoVis. September, 2006. `Re-visualising our world´. Manchester, U.K..
  • InfoVis. October, 2006. `Worldmapper: the world as you´ve never seen it before´. Baltimore, U.S.A..
  • Environmental Inequalities: Pollution, inequalities and health Seminar (run by ESRC/NERC). 16 th January, 2007. `Mapping health and environmental inequalities on a global scale, experience from the worldmapper project´. Newcastle, U.K..
  • London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, lunchtime seminar. 8 th March, 2008.` Visualising Health Inequalities: world maps of death, disease and unhealthy environments´ . London , U.K..

Selected Publications

  • Barford, A., Dorling, D., Smith, G. D., and Shaw, M., 2006. `Life expectancy: women now on top everywhere´. British Medical Journal, 332, April 2006.
    doi:10.1136/bmj.332.7545.808
  • Dorling, D. and Barford, A., 2006. `What's Wrong With This Picture?´ New Scientist, 2550, 6th May 2006 . (Translated and re-published in Courrier Japon, 017).
    Article (PDF) Reproduced with permission from New Scientist
  • Barford, A. and Dorling, D., 2006. `Worldmapper: The world as you´ve never seen it before´. Teaching Geography, 31,2, Summer 2006.
    Article (PDF) Reproduced with permission from the Geographical Association
  • Dorling, D., Barford, A. and Newman, M., 2006. `Worldmapper: the world as you´ve never seen it before´. IEEE Transactions on Visualisation and Computer Graphics, 12,5. September / October, 2006.
    doi:10.1109/TVCG.2006.202
  • Dorling, D. and Barford, A. `Humanising Geography´. Geography, Autumn 2006: 187-197
    Article (PDF) Reproduced with permission from the Geographical Association
  • Moraru, M., Barford, A. and Dorling, D.. 2006. `The long war´. StudentBMJ: 14
    Article (PDF) Reproduced with permission from the BMJ Publishing Group

See also