Feb
4,
2010
Ben took our show on the road yesterday, speaking about live data visualization at the Webtrends Engage conference in New Orleans. I really like the format that the presentations were in: twice as wide as a normal slide deck and right behind the speakers, so Ben could stride the boards, point at interface elements, walk over to the project description, and so forth.
Image by justinogarrity
One of these days I'd really like to try this out; I find that if I can walk around on stage I sound alot more excited, wave my hands etc. If I'm stuck behind a podium I tend to drone a bit. In this regard I've been of course watching Hans Rosling's videos closely, where he bluescreens visualizations behind him—although he seems to have shifted to talking out of a little window lately instead, which seems like a shame.
Also, Sha is in LA today, speaking at a 'next generation content' event put on by our friends at Contagious Magazine (whose December 2008 writeup of the studio is the most thorough yet). Sha's also teaching a workshop called Neocartography: An Introduction to Interactive Mapping in Flash, and I'm delighted to see him stepping out and representing the studio in the ways that he is.
Continue reading "On the Road"
Jan
23,
2010
The Hope For Haiti telethon is winding down and by all accounts things the after party is going smoothly. The live map we designed & built for MTV is here, there's some conversation going on about it here, and it looks something like this when it's in full swing:
It's early Saturday morning in Munich, and I'm boning up on my cultural bona fides for Monday's talk. It's cold and dark but the general gemütlichkeit of the place is more than making up for it.
Continue reading "Hope For Haiti on MTV"
Jan
21,
2010
Mike & Sha just left the studio for LA, where they're putting the finishing touches on a twitter visualization for use during MTV's Hope for Haiti telethon tomorrow. More on this as it progresses, but I'm very excited about this one. We're going to be visualizing live activity around the world during the telethon, similar to our previous work with MTV, but this time the project will be running off a Stamen-built backend and moderating system that Mike & Aaron and Tom have been working on for these kinds of events. It looks like the telethon will be broadcast on multiple networks, and I'll post a URL when I've got one.
Meanwhile I'm at SFO, waiting for my flight to London on the first leg of a trip to Munich where I'll be participating in a panel on "Maps for the 21st Century," hosted by Hans Ulrich Obrist as part of the DLD conference that's taking place there this weekend. I'm hoping to get a 2009 year in review post together while I'm away—maybe on the plane. It's tough to look back when there's this much happening!
Continue reading "And away we go"
Jan
8,
2010
We're back in the saddle again after closing the studio for the last two weeks of December. It always confounds me how surprised people are when we say we'll be closed for that long, as though it were excessive. That amount of time feels to me about the minimum I'd want to genuinely start to unwind, and if we didn't close the studio we'd basically get nothing done except coordinate who was and wasn't around. I took the time to drive down to Santa Barbara via Highway 1 & stare at the water with my wife and do very little else, which was just about perfect.
In any event we're back, and a few interesting things are starting to happen. We're as booked up as we've ever been, which is marvelous but brings its own kinds of stresses—how are we going to get all this work done in a way that still leaves room for invention, discovery and play—and Deborah and I are spending an ever-growing amount of time working out schedules and planning. A resolution the studio's committed to for 2010 is that no project will ever have less than 2 people working on it—if we learned anything last year it's that we're stronger when we lean on each other, and that getting lost in the details of a project is much less likely when you've got someone who's intimately familiar with what you're working on.
A little about what's coming up—we're continuing to work with MTV and Twitter on real-time spectacle/analysis of what the internet thinks, and Mike is taking a close look at how that all fits together, in addition to speaking down at Stanford today on some map-related work we'd like to do. Shawn is continuing to work with the London Olympics on refinements to their map, and the two of us spent some time today looking into the datasets of two projects we're considering taking on. Tom, Sha and Aaron have been working on a project for CNET mapping wireless signals (more on that soon), specifically for a demo at CNET's CES booth in Vegas this week, at which (apparently) Drew Carey stopped by to chat:
And Geraldine continues to refine just about everything we touch. We had our first Dreams and Aspirations meeting for the year, and the studio feels very much on the same page to me; we have some differences about the sizes of jobs we'd like to be doing (lots of little projects? a few giant ones? how many independent projects?), but I know we'll deal with those the way we always do, through lots of talking and responding to changes in the business & creative opportunities that come our way as the year goes.
As for me, I'm settling in: trying to get the website back in order after a busy 2009 (there're a pile of projects that need posting), spending about half my time on the phone with potential new clients, and adding some patina to the studio in the form of maps (see the first photo—an amazing bathymetric set of maps of the world I found in Santa Barbara), hooks, books and plants. HQ2 is very different from HQ1—for one thing, there's room enough to spread 20 feet of map on the floor, and hang 11 feet long maps of Africa that I bought at the flea market last Sunday—and it has a bit less of that Sam Spade feel (since I've never actually lived here). I'm reading Ove Arup's biography and Steve Martin's autobiography, thinking about the lives of these men and the levels they operate(d) at and how they worked hard and how their dreams came true. I walk into the studio just about every day with a sense of real possibility and calm; the space calms me down and lifts me up at the very same moment, if that's possible.
Continue reading "HQ2, week 11"
Nov
20,
2009
As previously mentioned, Cabspotting has been getting successively less live GPS taxi data from Yellow Cab during the last few months, resulting in an anemic and much spindlier (spindlier?) view of San Francisco than is normal when it's in a healthy state:
Being Stamen, of course we didn't think to just pick up the phone and call Yellow Cab and ask them what was going on, but instead started making database queries and visualizations of taxi activity over time, and engaging in wild and baseless musings on what was happening. So, this (by Shawn):
The graph shows the last 6 months of activity, from May to November. And you can see both the number of cabs reporting and the number of points being reported go down in pretty much lock step. Mike speculated that Yellow Cab was switching their fleet over to a new GPS monitoring system, and switching the cabs out over time. A call to the dispatch confirmed that this is exactly what's going on, and the switch is almost done. Yellow Cab's told us that they'll be restoring the feed in the next week or thereabouts, so we'll be keeping our eyes open & hopefully the data will be back to normal shortly. And if you, like UC Berkeley's Mobile Millenium Project, are using the data, please reach out and let us know.
Update, Nov 21: Everything's back to normal. Lesson for the week: sometimes it's just better to pick up the phone :)
Continue reading "The deal with Cabspotting"
Nov
17,
2009
Our second full week in Stamen HQ2 still found us wandering around the new space, blinking at the possibilities. There's a whole room full of empty and as-yet-uncrushed boxes, a room full of my old stuff (I used to live at Stamen HQ1, back in the day), a room with mostly plant-free large pots from our old space that will eventually become holders for our new trees, and rooms that we're mostly unsure of. On the flip side I've set up the orchids near the west window, we have a little new sitting room next to my office that looks out on the mad sprawl of 16th and Mission as well as downtown San Francisco, the whiteboard paint on the walls is being used, we had our first client visit day, we're laying down rugs and buying chairs things are generally coming together, and it's starting to feel a bit more like home. It took me 8 years of place making to get the old studio right, and it's sometimes hard to remember that we've only been here for 2 weeks. But HQ2 has good bones, and I can't wait to see how it looks in a year.
Out in public, a few things to report:
Thing 1: We released a new map project for the ACLU called The War is Everywhere, which shows the locations of those held under the indefinite detention regime set up during the War on Terror (and which President Obama, mercifully, seems to be making steps towards curbing the worst excesses of. It's always chilling to engage with this material—we have another project in the works which deals with a similarly grisly aspect of the previous administration's policies—but it feels good to be participating in some small way in America's rehabilitation after a long period of madness and fear.
Thing 2: The City of San Francisco, already in our good graces for releasing the official crime statistics that make San Francisco Crimespotting possible, has released a whole new swath of data going back to 2003, making the project that much more interesting. A recent breakdown of the crime types that they're now providing looks like this:
Other Offenses (5812) / Non-criminal (2907) / Warrants (1408) / Suspicious Occ (1063) / Missing Person (853) / Fraud (489) / Forgery/counterfeiting (391) / Weapon Laws (312) / Trespass (304) / Disorderly Conduct (202) / Drunkenness (185) / Stolen Property (164) / Driving Under The Influence (140) / Kidnapping (109) / Liquor Laws (87) / Runaway (76) / Loitering (36) / Family Offenses (27) / Suicide (25) / Embezzlement (22) / Bribery (12) / Bad Checks (8) / Gambling (7) / Extortion (7) / Sex Offenses, Non Forcible (4)
So we're clearly going to have to find a better organizing scheme than the 13 category-strong one we have now, without turning the project into one giant checkbox, a situation it was explicitly designed to provide an alternative to. In the meantime the project now has links to prostitution, though murder is still conspicuously absent—so more on this soon. Shawn has been totally rocking this project and the relationship with the City, and we're learning how to delegate proper time to engagements with civic infrastructure—it takes time, and (so far) there's no money in it, so we're thinking about how to balance that with the demands of interesting client work.
Thing 3: Another interesting but profit-free project we've had running for some time, Cabspotting, has had some hiccups in the last week. Something's up with the feed, and we're getting only about 10% of the taxis coming through as we used to. There's been a sharp uptick in mail about it, as it turns out that lots of people are using the feed on a regular basis—which would have been nice to know, people—so we're going to have to take a look at that & figure out what to do. I really want to keep the project going—it's one of those projects that lets us have conversations about digital civic infrastructure that are hard to have otherwise.
One option would be to pickle it: to have it displaying, say, what the data looked like in 2008, when things were more stable. This would be sad, as there's something about saying "this is where the Yellow Cabs are now" that can't quite be matched by a canned dataset. We'll see. Maintaining these ongoing not-profitable projects over many years is something we haven't quite figured out how to handle; it's important to do, as it serves as a benchmark for what's possible and for what should be done, but it can get lost in the flurry of paying client work. Sha has been poking at me to find ways for, say, the Knight Ridder Foundation to fund some of these projects moving forward (they gave $485,380 to fund a variety of projects last year, including Development Seed) and we're interested in finding ways that these projects can be more than simply lures for potential client work down the line.
Thing 4: CNN wrote an article about data visualization in general, which had a bit about us in particular:
"Cities like San Francisco, Washington D.C., and New York meanwhile hold developer competitions to encourage greater use of the data sets they're releasing, with iPhone apps being of particular interest.
"The variety of clients at Stamen, a San Francisco firm noted for its data visualizations, speaks to the craft's increasing reach. Financial institutions, architects, carmakers, design agencies, museums, tech firms, political action committees, and universities have all knocked on Stamen's doors."
The continued movement of data visualization from the academy into the mainstream is, as you can imagine, of keen interest here at Stamen—it's broadening the conversation from data nerds to the broader public. At some point it's not going to be accurate any more to say that it's moving into the mainstream anymore, and the work will be more about innovation within a mature medium than about increasingly bold salvoes against previously walled-off datasets. Eventually we'll be firmly in the realm of fashion design, which (as Ben is so fond of saying) is how Stamen should really think of itself: where seasonal iteration is the point, technical experimentation is considered essential to the work, and style vies with substance for the upper hand and often wins. And fashion, as Karl Lagerfeld puts it, is "ephemeral, dangerous and unfair."
An iron triangle of iPhone, civic data, and data visualization feels unavoidable at this point, at least among those writing about visualization in the press. One of our clients talked about how, far from the iPhone being a fancy phone for yuppies, it's better to think about it as a primary computer for low-income people. So we're going to have to address this sooner or later, hopefully sooner; it feels like location-specific mobile work is just at our fingertips.
Thing 5:I spoke at two symposiums at GAFFTA, the new art space where our "Tenderloin Dynamic" is installed in the mezzannine, with Casey Reas and Camille Utterback.
On the second night, we had a wide ranging discussion about the role of the public in our work, how feedback impacts the design/art process, the use of public datasets in art, and so on. The first night was a visit from an art collector's club put together by the Pacific Film Archive and Peter Hirshberg, which was a chance to be exposed to the more, shall we say, refined audience for digital art, and a new and intriguing experience for me. We're increasingly being asked to participate in museum and gallery shows, and are learning to insist on a live internet connection as a condition of our involvement, which makes it easier to digest the change from online-only to site-specific work.
Thing 6: Mike posted some notes about Canvas and HTML5 and how these newish technologies are starting to look like a potential new avenue for online visualization. In particular, there seem to be some intriguing possibilities in managing map warping, which could be a useful tool in geo-rectifying old maps for use in more modern formattings:
Strictly speaking, this happened the week before last, and not this week, but it took me a while to digest it, so Thing 6 is more properly "I spent some time wrapping my head around Mike's latest thing."
And so, phew, and yay HQ2. Tom's written another in-studio diary "week in Stamen" mail, but of course it's peppered with references to "Big Client A" and works-in-progress, and we're not quite sure how to get around that if we want to make it public. In the meantime, I'm going to have to learn how to write faster.
Continue reading "HQ2 week 2"
Nov
6,
2009
We spent our first full week in the new studio, which I'm calling Stamen HQ2. It's been a good week - HQ2 is a bit larger than we're used to (and truth be told, comfortable with) so we're still in that stage where we're wandering around looking into corners and trying out the distances between the rooms. We're getting there, putting the orchids back in the windows, setting up the kitchen, and figuring out how to interact with each other now that there are doors that can (but generally don't) close. There aren't nearly enough chairs, but the floors are really nice and clean, and we're still pointing at maps:
The move is looking to have been a good decision in retrospect, as it turns out: we're going to need some more room very soon (and HQ1 had basically no more of it) as our good friend and master mapmaker Aaron Straup Cope has left Flickr after a good 5 year run and decided to come and work at Stamen:
The good news is that I've accepted a position to frolic around and play with the trouble-makers that are Stamen Design because "it seems like too good an opportunity and one that I would always wonder about if I'd said no". It's not often you get to say something like that twice in a row and in the immortal words of Gibby Haynes: 'It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done.'
To which I say: yay. I don't think it's an exaggeration (and I hope I'm not putting too much pressure on Aaron) to say that I think we're about to see a whole new level of possibility open up as a result of this. Mike has been shouldering the increasingly heavy burden of responsibility for Stamen's backend work on his own for a long time, and having Aaron around to work with him at the level that he can (and already hasis really exciting in its own right. And Aaron, in addition to having made a whole series of amazing contributions to Flickr over the years, has built things that derive location from geotagged flickr photos and fake subway APIs (you know, for when realtime proper APIs are an assumed part of digital civic infrastructure, just like electricity), and so we're just tickled.
I say again yay:
Photo by Aaron
It's been quite a week otherwise:
- We launched a new business map for LOCOG, and it's great to see the original map we made for them start to branch out into other uses
- The custom cartography work we did for local news site Patch went live yesterday. We used OSM data to generate a set of map tiles that worked much better with Patch's subdued green branding than Google Maps's bright orange freeways did. There was a little flap about this, as people seemed to think that Patch should've used MapQuest's map for this (the companies are both owned by AOL). From where we sit, it seems like using a MapQuest or Google map in your site is great branding for MapQuest or Google, but not necessarily for you—so we're glad to see companies like Patch caring enough about their brand to extend it all the way into their cartography. You can see larger versions of the maps here, and learn how to make custom maps of your own at http://mapsfromscratch.com/.
- We changed up the work we did with MTV on the European Music Awards, and the piece is (as of this writing) still tracking live twitter traffic related to the EMAs, here.
Alot happened that's not publishable yet, and that's a shame. Tom wrote up a "week at Stamen" mail last week that put the week's goings-on into a diary format, at the encouragement of Matt Webb, who's been writing wonderful weekly updates over at Berg that we've both been paying attention to. I love that they're doing it, and the discipline of keeping a diary of everything that's happening at our busy studio really appeals—but I'm not sure I have the time or the discipline, and as most of what I do (besides creative direction & generally running the business) is forward-looking biz dev, so it's hard to talk about in public. Maybe I'll ask Tom to help me write it; he seems to have a much easier time putting words down (for me it's like pulling teeth).
Continue reading "HQ2 week 1"
Oct
27,
2009
Well, it's been a few years since I've needed to kick a coconut into all the corners of a new space (to absorb any potential bad juju, naturally) before moving in, but: here we go again!
The capable and strapping men at Bay City Movers have just spent about 9 hours on Tuesday loading all our stuff into a truck and moving it about 250 feet down the street to our new digs, at 2017 Mission St., Suite 300, in San Francisco. We can literally see the old studio out the windows of the new studio, and vise versa—so in geographical terms it's not such a big move, but the difference in the quality of the space is like night and day, the difference between this (and you shoulda seen it way back when):
and this:
It's a lot bigger than our old space, so we've spent the last couple of days rattling around the hallways and things are a bit chaotic, and in the case of the plant room/solarium, wonderfully so:
And the sunsets in the corner meeting room sure are lovely:
(all photos by Sha Hwang (who still owes me his bio), except the top one)
In some ways it's a shame to move now—Google just literally put Stamen on the map in their latest design update:
Sadly, it's at our old location. If only there were some way that people could update our location on a map...
Continue reading "Movin' On Up"
Oct
21,
2009
For re-posting as far as the winds will take it: we are looking for a Studio Manager to help Deborah keep things running smoothly around here. Specifically:
We're looking for a confident, caring and motivated person to help run our busy Mission design studio. We are looking for someone with excellent organization skills, who's clear and bold in both vocal and written expression, is computer literate, has a positive and professional demeanor, has the ability to prioritize and juggle multiple tasks, and is comfortable working in a dynamic service business that is receiving increased attention from the outside world. Flexibility and versatility are a must as we work quickly, organically, and collaboratively. You will be joining a close-knit team and we will very quickly start to rely on you for things that are important to us.
It's an important job—when it's not done right, no work can happen. Deborah used to do all of this but there's just too much going on. More details here. Interested? Apply!
Continue reading "We're looking for a Studio Manager"
Oct
15,
2009
We learned today that San Francisco Crimespotting was featured in today's Guardian, which is nice! Esopus was kind enough to send a link to an online viewer, and Zapme's offered to send us a copy, and the article below that one is about how London's talking about doing the same thing - get with it, people!
Image by harry_wood
Continue reading "Crimespotting in the Guardian"
Oct
1,
2009
Sha and I are here at GAFFTA after midnight the night before the show (and the place is packed! packed, I say, with smarties), finishing up the final details of our installation (which opens tomorrow), Alfonso and Julie (pictured below) are gracefully and delicately applying our wall-sized maps to the walls of the mezzanine, Josette and her crew of volunteers are handling the whole show, it's all coming together, I can't believe it, huzzah!
Update 10/05: a previous version of this post referenced Josette in the image above: that's actually Julie, who was incredible to work with and totally helpful and was very much appreciated throughout the whole process. Thanks Julie!
Continue reading "GAFFTA: It's all happening"
Sep
30,
2009
Sha and I were walking along 6th Street in San Francisco the other day,and Sha noticed one of my favorite views: Stevenson Street from 6th towards 5th, recently enhanced by the monumental bulk of Morphosis' new-ish San Francisco Federal Building looming up behind, all Blade Runner in San Francisco-style. Google shows it OK, Microsoft's birds-eye is nice but too far out, but I realized that I'd taken my own photos of the alley years ago, before I started Stamen and was working as an independent designer for companies like eLine.
This was probably...2000? 2001? eLine'd just moved into their new building and their site needed a new look, so I spent a day taking photographs of the space, trying to capture the stark but comfy feel of their industrial space, and the casually intense nature of the work environment. Sort of like Stamen: plants and books everywhere, quiet intensity, lots of laughter, while right outside the madness of 6th and Market raged and swung:
In any event this was back in 2000, or so and buying a building right off of 6th Street was an optimistic gesture to say the least. I've had an office at 16th and Mission for 9 years now, and even I definitely made sure I kept my New York face on when I walked down there for design reviews. And I've been watching that neighborhood closely ever since, thinking that it and the adjoining Tenderloin, where I've lived since 2001, were too central, too beautiful, too urban and dense and ultimately interesting to stay run-down and ignored and basically a containment zone for too much longer.
Lately there's been alot of interesting (I would say positive) development about the neighborhood -from the new police chief's targeted (and highly effective) drug bust, to proposals to turn a blighted stretch of Market Street into San Francisco's version of Times Square, to Mona Caron's lovely new building-sized mural (extra points if you can identify the lady painting), to traffic closures on Market Street making the district more accessible to bikes and pedestrians, to new galleries opening up on O'Farrell and Geary Streets. Walking around, especially at night, feels different than it did even a few months ago—it's safer, cleaner, and there are alot more people out on the street walking and doing things, instead of yelling or fighting or dealing drugs or just generally being antisocial.
All of this is a perhaps overlong preamble to me being able to express my delight that Stamen is participating in the inaugural show for a new digital arts space in the Tenderloin: the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, or GAFFTA. We're installing a site specific piece called Tenderloin Dynamic, which explores some familiar datasets: cabs and crimes of course, but also some new data from the Uptown Tenderloin National Register Historic District, trees, building permits, etc. The installation is about understanding the neighborhood as a varied and dynamic system with its own ebbs and flows, and we're trying to come up with a series of views that help people understand a neighborhood that is generally represented as a monolithic, homogenous, and unpleasant spot.
Gallery shows are a departure from our usual activity—we generally tend more towards making map-generating engines than towards static representations, especially ones that get hung on gallery walls, and our only other gallery show was a dynamic system, whereas here we're working mostly in large scale prints. But we've been given the whole mezzanine to work with, and what would normally be a challenge for thing-on-wall-hanging—the space has mostly half-walls that overlook the gallery proper—has turned into an interesting place to think about transparency and visibility into the neighborhood, a subject that the SFMOMA blog has contentiously addressed here and here.
I have to say that it's an honor to be included on the same roster as Casey Reas and Camille Utterback, inventor of McArthur grant recipient, respectively—these are people you read about in textbooks on interactive media, and to be included in the same breath with them is exciting and a little humbling; I hope we can provide a worthwhile contribution to this top-notch group of digital practitioners.
In any event, the show is happening, I'm excited, you can read about it on the GAFFTA blog, and should you be anywhere near the Tenderloin on the night of Thursday, October 1 (for the fund raiser, which costs), or on Friday, October 2, please do stop by, we'd love to take you on a tour of the mezzanine!
Continue reading "Stamen show at GAFFTA with Casey Reas and Camille Utterback"
Sep
14,
2009
As promised, here are some screenshots and photos taken during yesterday's music awards ceremony at Radio City Music Hall.
Radian6 polled twitter data in real time, searching for MTV, VMA, and a few other event-related terms, as well as the names of all the celebrities that we knew would be at the event. The idea was to provide a rolling snapshot of activity that we would use to build a real-time visualization of who was being talked about at the awards, as well as what people were saying about them. Not surprisingly, just before the event, by far the dominant character was "MTV" itself:
For the first hour and a half (we started at 8am EST), things went pretty much as expected. Celebrities arrived, walked down the red carpet, preened, and went into the venue, and you could see their twitter traffic rise and fall accordingly. Fans noticed that Pink and Shakira were wearing the same dress, you could see this reflected in the keywords about those two celebrities, and their charts started going up and down at about the same rate - below, somewhere between 10 and 50 tweets every 30 seconds, which if you think about it, is kind of a lot.
At around 9:25, Taylor Swift accepted the award for best female video - her line is the red one on the bottom of the screen below, and you can see it just jump to 2261 in 30 seconds - which again is kind of a lot. Kanye West, who hadn't yet stormed the stage & taken the microphone from her, was at about 8 tweets every 30 seconds.
Immediately afterwards, Kanye's #'s shot through the roof, to almost 5000 tweets in 30 seconds, and remained upwards of 2000 tweets every 30 seconds for most of the night. Note that the keywords associated with Kanye were at this point still fairly benign: "love," "performance," etc.
After Radian6's servers had a few minutes to chew on the huge numbers of tweets they were receiving, a few other words crept in, see below. These were of course quickly removed by MTV - not that anyone on TV ever saw this, but still.
It wasn't all excitement - we spent most of our time in a 10' x 10' tent on 51st Street, hunched over our laptops (like in Mike's recent trip to Camp Roberts, surrounded by a different kind of star):
watching Justine talk about the visualization on a tiny little monitor, with huge crowds gathering on 6th Avenue behind her:
We did get a few chances to duck into the venue though, and if you ever get a chance to see the prep for a major concert, let me highly recommend it. The way a mostly empty Radio City Music Hall, buzzing with activity and booming with rock and roll and pyrotechnic tests but strangely quiet and professional, sends an anticipatory chill up the spine, is not something I'll soon forget.
Having been through this it's a bit easier for me to understand why TV people have such a hard time with the internet (and believe me, I ran into a few on the set): there's something profoundly exciting and, yes, visceral about 1000 qualified professionals all quietly working for months to providing 3 hours of the best-crafted pop in the world, that makes it hard to believe that people would prefer passing 140 character messages around in mostly quiet rooms. But more on that later.
All in all it's been a really memorable experience for me—Sha totally kicked ass again, coding in the tent while Green Day made the sidewalk rumble, Deborah ran logistics and made sure we could work effectively, Shawn backed us up in San Francisco, Justine did a great job on top of the marquee at Radio City, Radian6 totally made it happen, Chloe from twitter pulled the whole live thing off swimmingly, and Michael Scogin and his team at MTV were as supportive as I could have ever hoped. We did the whole thing in a month, the visualization (which is still live, by the way) stayed up the whole time, it was shown on live MTV, and I'm about to take the rest of the day off and stroll around on a gorgeous New York City afternoon.
I love it when a plan comes together!
Continue reading "Kanye West is an a**hole and other Twitter moments from the MTV Video Music Awards"
Sep
13,
2009
I've been camped out on 51st Street next to Radio City Music Hall for the last two days with people from Twitter, Radian6, and MTV for the past two days (and nights), and we're on deadline for tonight so a more complete post on this will have to wait, but in the meantime, there's this to consider (from Reuters):
MTV.com, Radian6 and Stamen Bring Real-Time Online Buzz Via Twitter to Live TV For The '2009 MTV Video Music Awards'
MTV.com to Host Exclusive Content, Interactive Watch and Discuss Video, Dedicated Online Fashion Shows from Red Carpet and More
NEW YORK, Sept. 11 /PRNewswire/ -- In line with efforts to bring fans closer and truly make them part of the show, MTV is teaming up with leading interactive and social media companies Radian6 and Stamen to bring fans real-time online Twitter visualization experiences to complement the "2009 MTV Video Music Awards" airing live on Sunday, September 13 at 8pm ET/PT. Popular video blogger iJustine (Justine Ezarik) will be the official VMA "Twitter Correspondent," and will be interpreting Twitter comments during the redcarpet pre-show. The on-air component will be executed through a new interactive application created in partnership with social media measurement company Radian6 and design firm Stamen, and will bring Twitter to the television in a new and interesting manner.
That's us in the middle, with the moon guy:
Continue reading "Stamen on MTV"
Sep
3,
2009
The State of California launched our most recent project today, a closer look at the $5.6 billion in Federal Stimulus funds that the State has received so far. There's alot there and I hope you'll go play with it yourself but the main thing I want to say is that you can slice and dice it all kinds of different ways and it's just slick as hell.
And this one is from a little while ago, but I didn't blog it when it came out—a live visualization of activity between computers for LogMeIn, whose recent successful IPO is leading some to speculate that perhaps all is not lost.
Both of these projects were headed up by Sha Hwang (whose bio I'm still waiting for) who's been doing some really great work at Stamen since he started about a year ago.
In local news, there's been a huge sting operation in San Francisco's Tenderloin aimed at reducing crime in one of the city's most troubled neighborhoods, which has apparently reduced things like property crime in the neighborhood dramatically. Since we've got access to the city's crime data for the dates of the sting, it should be interesting over the next few weeks to see how the map changes in response to this effort.
Continue reading "And the maps just keep on comin'"
Aug
19,
2009
Today we're proud to announce San Francisco Crimespotting, an interactive map of crime in the city that Stamen calls home.
We've timed today's release to coincide with the public launch of DataSF, San Francisco's new clearinghouse for city government data. Crime incident data used in SF Crimespotting comes directly from the city this time, and we're thankful to their team for making this data source one of the first ones available at launch.
We've made some improvements to the UI in the process of adapting the map to San Francisco's geography, specifically:
- The crime type filters are grayed out when no crimes of that type exist in the selected date range. (You may have noticed that there aren't any Alcohol or Prostitution markers, even in the Mission. That's a bug, and we're working on it.)
- The weekly labels on the date slider are clickable, so you can more easily select weeks at a time.
Because San Franciso is shaped differently from Oakland, we're investigating ways to reorganize the interface elements so that the entire city is visible in the initial map view.
All in all, though, we're very happy with it and agree that crime has never looked so good.
[Cross-posted from the Crimespotting blog, written by Shawn Allen]
Continue reading "San Francisco Crimespotting is live"
Aug
18,
2009
Stamen partner Mike Migurski wrote a few days ago about his experience running around on desert military bases, teaching the Army how to use Walking Papers in Afghanistan after an earthquake. It looks like that effort is paying off, in the form of maps of the current Afghan elections; this is from the Global Development Commons site:
As the 2009 elections rapidly approach in Afghanistan, a new partnership is on the ground with an innovative tool to monitor and disseminate election related violence and other related trends.
The Global Development Commons at USAID is proud to be partnering with FortiusOne’s GeoCommons, Google, OpenStreetMap, Stamen, Development Seed and many others who are working to map data on election related violence and trends around the Afghanistan 2009 Elections. This map is available in real time to anyone with an internet connection, creating an unprecedented degree of transparency. Check out the map and the data available so far, or upload your own data to build it out even more.
Continue reading "USAID maps used in Afghanistan election coverage"
Aug
12,
2009
Our old pal (and semi-recent collaborator) Mike Frumin has been doing some really interesting work on transportation statistics for the City of New York, and his most recent blog post is no exception. It's about how many extra roads and parking lots you'd need to deploy on and around the island of Manhattan in order to accommodate the number of people that the subway moves every day, if they all wanted to drive:
At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.
Of course, at 325 square feet per parking space, all these cars would need over 3.8 square miles of space to park, about 3 times the size of Central Park. At that point, who would want to go to Manhattan anyway?
Mike thinks it'd look something like this:
where entire sections of town are given up to parking and roads, sort of like Harvey WIley Corbett's designs for lifting cars off of the ground entirely:
and enormous bridges covering the entire surface of the rivers, like Gustav Lindenthal's ""bridge apartment houses," proposed in 1925:
Continue reading "Lower Manhattan as one big parking lot"
Jun
5,
2009
I know we mentioned it briefly in our post earlier this week about the design update to the Crimespotting project, but I'm so excited about how the project relates to day vs. night that I want to address it a little more directly:
It's pretty good: you can view crimes by time, turning hours on and off one by one, or using a couple different settings: morning commute, happy hour, police swing shift, etc. So that's good, and better than what we had before (and most of what else I've seen online). But!
I've looked under the hood at how a few police departments look at crime, and from what I can tell, most of them use a pretty straightforward mechanism for looking activity in there area, based on the three shift system: day shift (8am to 4pm), night shift (4pm to midnight), and swing shift (midnight to 8am). Reports will say "crime is up on the night shift this month," things like that. It seems to be institutionalized enough an approach that Mike told me about an urban myth where, since the cops at 4pm are either driving back to or leaving the station, you can commit any crime you want between 3:45 and 4:15 pm and there's nothing they can do about it! (snickers, passes doob)
In any event there doesn't seem to be much out there that takes into account not only the time that a crime has happened, but also how light it was outside. It feels intuitively correct that more crime happens when it's dark, and we didn't really have a way to figure this out on an ongoing basis, until now. Each of the images above is from a different month in 2008, and you can see that the amount of time that it's dark and light changes over the year. And selecting "day" or "night" in the interface will do something different in May than it does in December, since there's more light in May. And this potentially has an impact on how you view crime over time, at least I think it does.
I'm imagining a Gladwellian situation where, in a stroke of brilliant intuitive analysis, standard crime thinking is upended, as a bright splash of crime emerges out of the data relative to twilight over the year, not time of day... Anyhow, someone hit the Crimespotting API and figure that out, wouldja?
I love working here!
Continue reading "Can I just say something about the pie of time"
Jun
2,
2009
We're happy to release two updates to the interactive map that address our most frequent feedback requests: you can now filter crime reports by time of day, and link to and view custom reports for the last two years of crime in Oakland.
Hours
The interface we've created to navigate through the hours of the day is something we're calling the “time pie”, a small circle not unlike a pie chart, with the full 24 hour cycle around its perimeter. Noon is at the top, midnight is at the bottom, 6pm and 6am to the left and right. Hours of sunlight are shown as a slight shading in the background of the circle, and these update according to what day you've selected. The hours of the time pie can be individually switched on and off, and you can also click and drag it to enable or disable a range of hours. Any time span can be selected, and we've added a set of buttons that show a few time slices that we think are particularly meaningful:
- Hours of daylight and darkness based on local sunset and sunrise times
- Commute hours for the morning and evening
- Nightlife hours spanning happy hour to last call
- Three police shifts: day, night, and swing
We're hoping these categories will broaden the project's reach, and make it that much more useful to both the public and the police alike. The last time slices (day, night and swing) are the ways that the police view this information, and one thing we hope will come from the project is a better understanding of how the police view their data as it's collected.
We think the time pie is better than anything else out there in the online crime mapping world- as far as we know, Crimespotting is the only site to offer a filter for specific hours of the day on an interactive map - please leave a comment below if you know different.
Days
We've also upgraded the the map's date slider to include data all the way back to our summer 2007 launch. You can now page back and forth week by week using the two large arrows to the left and right of the date slider, and you will also find drop-down menus to quickly jump to a particular month and year in the past. Finally, there's a button that will navigate to the most recent week of report information.
Years
The data for the new years-long timespan is something we've always kept, but we were reluctant to display it on the site because we lacked a good method for visually navigating it. With the introduction of these hour and day widgets, it now makes sense for us to open the entirety of our archives stretching back to the middle of 2007. This means that old URLs for static representations of crime reports are now newly available, as well as a complete catalog of all reports made available to us in the Police Department's nightly spreadsheets.
Links
The long and the short of this new version is that it's much easier to see and link to a broad range of times and dates. In particular, it's now possible to navigate and link to recent newsworthy events like the assassination of journalist Chauncey Bailey, the Oscar Grant riots from January 2009, and the Lovelle Mixon incident from this past March. You can also retrieve data in spreadsheet form for individual police beats for any time in the past, helpful for a longer term understanding of neighborhood crime patterns.
Together, these two additions to the site make for a richer, more useful historical document and local watchdog tool. Please let us know what you think.
(cross-posted from the Crimespotting blog)
Continue reading "Oakland Crimespotting update: the pie of time"
