👋 Workshop Introduction
This website provides supporting materials for the workshop Analysing massive open human mobility data in R using spanishoddata, duckdb and flowmaps which is part of the AGIT 2025 conference held in Salzburg, Austria on July 1-3, 2025. This tutorial is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Large-scale human mobility datasets provide unprecedented opportunities to analyze and gain insights into movement patterns. Such insights are critical for fields ranging from transport planning and epidemiology to socio-spatial inequality research and climate-change mitigation. Until recently, access to human mobility data was a privilege of a few researchers. Thanks to countries like Spain that pioneered to make high-resolution aggregated human mobility data open, such data is becoming increasingly accessible. Thanks to the Multi-MNO project by Eurostat, similar mobility data may soon be widely available as part of official statistics across the European Union. However, the complexity and sheer volume of this data present practical challenges related to data acquisition, efficient processing, geographic disaggregation, network representation, and interactive visualization.
The workshop addresses these challenges by showcasing end-to-end workflows that harness newly developed and state-of-the-art R packages and methods. Participants will learn how to acquire and manage multi-gigabyte mobility datasets with {spanishoddata} and duckdb R packages, combine and compare the mobility flows across space and time by creating informative aggregate mobility flows visualizations using {flowmapper} and {flowmapblue} R packages.
Spanish open mobility data is used as a case study. This data contains anonymized and grouped flows between more than 3500 locations in Spain with hourly intervals across more than 3 full years. The flows are further split by age and income groups, sex, and activity type (home, work, regular, irregular) at both origin and destination, thereby presenting a universe of opportunities for analysis and research questions to explore.
Workshop participants will use {spanishoddata} R package (Kotov, Lovelace, and Vidal-Tortosa 2024) to access open human mobilty flows (Ministerio de Transportes y Movilidad Sostenible (MITMS) 2024) derived from mobile phones in Spain. They will analyse the data using cutting edge {duckdb} (Mühleisen and Raasveldt 2024) and make static and interactive visualisations with {flowmapper} (Mast 2024), {flowmapblue} (Boyandin 2024).
Stay tuned for updates!
References
Citation
@online{kotov2025,
author = {Kotov, Egor},
title = {AGIT 2025 {Workshop:} {Analysing} {Massive} {Open} {Human}
{Mobility} {Data} in {R} {Using} Spanishoddata, Duckdb and Flowmaps},
date = {2025-07-03},
url = {https://www.ekotov.pro/agit-2025-spanishoddata/},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15794849},
langid = {en}
}