stamen design

Apr 20, 2012

New Work: 2012 NewNowNext Awards

I still remember those long lost days when an "interactive website" meant a site that had a mouseover effect on the navigation bar. How far we've come. Working with the fantastic, bold branding, we created a Twitter Tracker for Logo TV's 2012 NewNowNext Awards that aired on April 6.

The animations on the site are crazy interactive:

2012 NewNowNext Awards Twitter Tracker from Stamen on Vimeo.

As we watched the show unfold, and the tweets get tweeted, it was super fun to see the NNN community rally around performers they like, and start to use the tracker to bump up attention.

Congratulations to all the winners, and to all the Tweeters who pushed their favorite stars into the coveted #1 spot!

• View the Project

Continue reading "New Work: 2012 NewNowNext Awards "

Apr 2, 2012

There are cupcakes with Stamen maps on them.

There are cupcakes with Stamen maps on them. Each one has a single tile printed on it. Cups and Cakes Bakery baked and prepared them. They were made for the Where 2.0 conference, where Mike is talking about how Old Is The New New and I am talking about Drawing Outside the Lines, which taken together is a pretty good indication of where Stamen's collective thoughts are.

THERE ARE CUPCAKES WITH STAMEN MAPS ON THEM.

Continue reading "There are cupcakes with Stamen maps on them."

Mar 30, 2012

Log Maps

by Jeff

Here's the final entry of a week of posts about the maps.stamen.com launch. As the launch of our new maps neared, I created a tool for us to look at how people are using the maps.

Pre-Launch

To speed up the loading of the maps, we try to pre-cache the map imagery. One problem. The Earth is big, and, no matter how popular, only a small percentage of it will actually be looked at on our maps. It would take our server years to render the entire world down to zoom 13 which still leaves 5 zooms levels uncached. We have some tricks to address this problem like only pre-caching areas with land, but this topic is one Nate is going to cover in the near future. Now ten days after launch, we wanted to see how people are using the map so in the future we can improve our pre-caching.

Tiles

First some background. Currently, most interactive maps on the internet are made of 256x256 pixel images called tiles (map tile background). Using tiles allows maps to load dynamically as you pan and render out the geometries for a bounded area making the image generation faster. Here we have a 3 tiles from our new basemaps at zooms 11, 12, and 14 respectively.

Maps

Like any other page on the Internet, as people browse the maps, server logs are generated which give us a list of tiles that were downloaded. I rendered this data out showing each tile at its location and area it takes. The smaller squares represent the 256x256 pixel images but at a higher zoom level. The colors cycle through the zoom levels.

This is the world for Toner which has been in testing for a few months. Europe and Africa are in the middle. For North America, Florida and the bi-costal densities are the only defining features. South America is absent.



Here is the same dataset but focused on the US. The Bay Area has been looked at heavily, likely due to internal testing use on local projects. The green smile across the bottom is likely someone following a highway, maybe I-20/30.



This map is the terrain map pre-launch showing the western US. The coastline from San Francisco to Mexico has been examined. Also, a large amount of Utah was looked in fine detail. This area is very sparse of population but likely someone looking at the hill-shading.



We were intrigued. This map of what people look at on maps was something we hadn't seen before. There was more detail than the initial static images could show so I turned it into a tile-server so we could make it interactive progressively showing more detail as you zoom in.

Here, viewing the grid of tiles, someone appears to have followed a river.



The Northeast corridor for all 3 tilesets.



In New York City, Wall Street, Dumbo, and Park Slope are getting looked over most closely.

Post-Launch

These are the log maps for just Watercolor over the last 10 days. They represent 1.2 million tiles served of which 350,000 were unique. As we saw previously, the US and Europe get a lot of viewing.



Not surprisingly, the map viewing correlates with city labels. The exceptions are along the coasts north of Los Angeles and of the Carolinas and Georgia.

Continue reading "Log Maps"

Mar 29, 2012

Terrain Process

by Mike

This is a follow up post to yesterday's post about watercolor textures, Tuesday's about watercolor process, and Monday's announcing the launch of maps.stamen.com.

Terrain Layer has been on my mind since 2008 when I first started to experiment with digital elevation data, but it’s only really come together in the past year when Nelson Minar and I started kicking ideas around for making an open source answer to Google’s terrain layer. As an amateur pilot and an iPad owner, Nelson was interested in something that would make sense seen from high above. I was interested in something that would make sense at medium zooms, with all the crazy data-munging that implies.

An image as simple as this, for example, requires so much more than plain OpenStreetMap data can provide:

Obviously, there are the hills. The streets present a problem, too: many large roads that you might see at this scale are modeled as “dual carriageways” in OSM, which means that they’re actually two one-way roads as far at the database is concerned, so you can end up with a lot of doubled-up street names. The route numbers are often hidden away in weird tags with extra junk attached, and even picking the right color for the ground is a challenge.

Happily, the U.S. Geological Survey has our back. They publish absolute mountains (heh) of fascinating and useful data, including high resolution elevation models of the entire country that can be transformed into shaded hills, and types of land cover that can be colored according to vegetation.

Gem Spear helped me develop a custom color palette for the landcover, explaining the meaning of different plant classes, five kinds of forest, combinations of shrubs, grasses and crops, and a few tundras and wetlands and how they should appear together on a map.

The ground and hill renderings are about imitating the work of Eduard Imhof, whose use of color derived from grayscale relief simulated the appearance of hills in sunlight. My version is drastically toned-down from his, but the hint of warm and cool are there:

Back in the foreground, we’re making three adjustments to the base OSM data to improve the look of these maps.

First, High Road is a framework for normalizing the rendering of highways from OSM data, a critical piece of every OSM-based road map we’ve ever designed at Stamen. Deciding exactly which kinds of roads appear at each zoom level can really be done just once, and ideally shouldn’t be part of a lengthy database query in your stylesheet. High Road sorts it all out, giving you good-looking road layering despite the zoom level.

The shields and labels are both driven by some work I’ve been doing with Schuyler Erle on Skeletron. It’s an attempt to generalize complex linework in code using a range of techniques from the straight skeleton to Voronoi tesselation. I’m pre-processing every major road in the U.S. at a variety of zoom levels, so that big, complicated, doubled-up and messy roads are grouped together into neat lines that can be labeled using big, legible type:

The highways are a special beast. I’m using a combination of Skeletron and route relations to add useful-looking highway shields for numbered freeways. One particular OpenStreetMap contributor, Nathan Edgars II, deserves special mention here. I feel as though every time I did any amount of research on correct representation or data for U.S. highways, NE2’s name would come up both in OSM and Wikipedia. He appears to be responsible for the majority of painstakingly organized highways on the map, which means that maps like this of the East L.A. freeway system can look more legible:

The final assembly takes place in TileStache’s Composite provider, inspired by Lars Ahlzen’s TopOSM to do exactly the kind of raster post-processing and compositing that makes this terrain map possible. Everything we’re using is 100% open and available via Github.

I’ll close with some images of my favorite spots:

Continue reading "Terrain Process"

Mar 28, 2012

Watercolor Textures

by Geraldine

Following up on Zach's post from yesterday and Eric's post on Monday, here's a peek into my process in creating watercolor textures for watercolor maps.

Below is a breakdown of the steps, a mix of the hand and the computer in all:

• Painting
• Scanning
• Making Tiles
• Cascadenik

Painting

My first concern was color. I started painting even swatches of colors using a very wide flat brush with vertical strokes.

Watercolor Maps, February 13

We weren't very happy with the results and moved the opposite direction.

I went through many rounds of painting and testing, experimenting with other types of brushes as I went along, as well as painting on smooth to rough varieties of paper. For the final product, a variety of brushes and papers were used depending on the desired result. For example, the rougher papers added that extra texture needed for ground areas. It was fun to mix it all up to convey a variety of terrain. ( See my set of textures available for use on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. )

The process of going back and forth from painting to the computer became a continuous cycle. Midway through as I became more and more familiar with the outcome of how the actual texture would appear on the screen when tiled, my painting process became more specific to achieve the desired texture, color, darkness, stroke, range of value that I wanted for each feature on the map.

For oceans, I painted a range of blues mixed with turquoise and violet.

For parks, I mixed yellow greens, forest greens, muddy greens in dark and light ranges.

It was like this for every feature on the map.

Oranges, reds and browns for motorways with major roads fading in and out underneath.

Lavender-gray buildings.

Towards the end I was using original textures with no color retouching, Photoshop was mainly used for cutting seamless tiles.

Making Tiles

The process of creating seamless tiles was just as painterly as the painting on paper. I quickly learned how to use that tiling feature in Photoshop and enjoyed the whole process of hiding the seams. Even at this step the desired color and texture was always in mind.

Some sample tiles below.

Watercolor Maps, March 2nd

Cascadenik

This is Zach and Mike's domain. Zach and I would discuss and tweak qualities of line and darkened edges, which are just some of the filters he created for this mapstyle. He would set me up with the desired filtered effects leaving me to focus primarily on the textures. For the final product, a texture was created for each zoom level and for each feature of the map. So for example, parks have a green texture tile for each zoom level and so on. This worked particularly well for zooming in and out of water bodies since it conveys the movement of the oceans.

Enjoy ^___^

Continue reading "Watercolor Textures"

Mar 26, 2012

Watercolor Process

Yesterday, we announced a trio of new maps on maps.stamen.com - we've had a lot of interest in how the watercolor map gets generated, so here's the play-by-play. We'll be using a section of London as an example:

To begin with, we wanted to capture some of the irregularities of a truly handmade object. Although we're working with OpenStreetMap vector data, we decided to do all of our styling in rasterspace - the main reason was to have access to the overlaps of objects, but there are a couple of really great side benefits: the process doesn't increase in time for denser areas (i.e. cities, which is mostly what people look at), and it's entirely deterministic (important when you're stiching together tiles). We also wanted to be able to treat ground, water, green space, and so on differently, so we're actually running this process multiple times for each tile.

First, we render out some extraordinarily vibrant Mapnik images:

These can then be split up by grabbing all the yellow (for instance) and using that as a mask:

Because of how OSM treats water, we're actually subtracting the blue area from the mask as well:

Next, we do a gaussian blur:

And add a perlin noise image. This is just a 1024x1024 image that we tile:

Now we do a threshold to get a new, fuzzier, wobblier outline:

And do some antialiasing to get our final mask:

Which gets applied to a tileable watercolor image:

The other fancy bit of code adds a slight dark outline to the painted areas, to mimic the watercolor drying at different rates, and depositing more pigment at the edges. To get this sort of edge darkening, we do a gaussian blur of the mask:

And only then use the original mask to get just the interesting bits:

But that ends up giving undue weight to small or narrow areas. So we invert that and use it as an alpha channel on the gaussian blur, which evens things out:

This is then added as an overlay onto the masked image from before:

And we have one layer! This process is repeated for the other layers (in this case, water, green spaces, civic spaces, and highways) and composited into the final image:

Tomorrow, Geraldine'll be posting about the textures that went into the map.

EXTRA BONUS CONTENT:

As you can imagine, there are a lot of variables that go into this algorithm - so, to help ourselves visualize what tweaking each of those did, we created any number of samples. As a peek behind the curtain, here are a couple of examples:

Continue reading "Watercolor Process"

Mar 22, 2012

maps.stamen.com is live

maps.stamen.com, the second installment of the City Tracking project funded by the Knight News Challenge, is live. These unique cartographic styles and tiles, based on data from Open Street Map, are available for the entire world, downloadable for use under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and free.

*takes deep breath*

There are three styles available: toner, terrain, and watercolor:

• Toner is about stripping online cartography down to its absolute essentials. It uses just black and white, describing a baseline that other kinds of data can be layered on. Stripping out any kind of color or image makes it easier to like focus on the interactive nature of online cartography: when do different labels show up for different cities? what should the thickness of freeways be at different zoom levels? and so forth. This project is the one that Nathaniel is hacking on at all hours, and it's great to be seeing Natural Earth data get more tightly integrated into the project over time.
• Terrain occupies a middle ground: "shaded hills, nice big text, and green where it belongs." In keeping with City Tracking's mandate to make it easier for people to tell stories about cities, this is an open-source alternative to Google's terrain maps, and it uses all open-source software like Skeletron to improve on the base line cartographic experience. Mike has been heading up this design, with help from Gem Spear and Nelson Minar.
• Watercolor pushes through to the other side of normal, bending the rules of traditional legibility in order to explore some new terrain. It incorporates hand-painted textures and algorithmic rule sets into a design that looks like it's been done by 10,000 slaves in the basement, but is rendered on the fly. Geraldine and Zach did the lion's share of the design and development on this one. This design is a mixed bag for me: I'm delighted to see it out in the world, but it's the thing that's pretty much kept me from looking at anything else for the last month and a half.

The code that runs Toner and Terrain is available for download and use at the Citytracking GitHub repository; watercolor we're going to wait on a little while until we can get some of the kinks ironed out. We talked about waiting to launch until watercolor was all buttoned up but what with all the attention that Open Street Map has been getting we decided to just bite the bullet and go for it.

We'll follow up this week with some posts on how everything works and how the sausage is made, and I've got a lot more to say about what I think this implies for what can be done with online maps and data visualization. In the meantime, have you seen how awesome Los Angeles, Washington DC, The Forbidden City, Massachussets Bay, Key West, London, New Orleans, New York, Versailles, and every other city in the cotton-pickin' world look when you point this thing at it? Holy heck.

Los Angeles

Washington DC

The Forbidden City

Massachusetts Bay

Key West

London

New Orleans

New York

San Francisco

Tokyo

Versailles

Continue reading "maps.stamen.com is live"

Mar 19, 2012

Surging Seas: sea level rise in your community

We've been working with the smarties and do-gooders at Climate Central for the better part of a year now, designing and programming and planning and rendering and otherwise embiggening the idea of a map that could bring the reality of climate change to people's doorsteps. As of last week, the project is available at http://sealevel.climatecentral.org.

We started with two ideas:

• most maps of sea level rise are generic. How could we bring home the idea that this isn't about "those people" but about you and your neighborhood? and
• most maps of sea level rise are about the shrinking land. As a percentage of total land area, these always feel small and unsatisfying. Why don't we focus on the land that's going to be underwater, and try to make it clear that this is the land that we're going to lose?

The context for this work is: while there are a great many papers, scientific studies, meteorological surveys and other things that fall under the rubric of things that normal people accept as true, there remains a persistent and nagging unreality to the idea that, in something like a normal human timescale, we'll see and have to reckon with large-scale changes to the world as we know it. It's one thing to say "the world is changing and all of us will have to deal with it." It's quite another to say "7.6% of the people and 9.1% of the homes may very well be underwater in Boston, and so you'll need to start thinking about that pretty damn soon, is that cool?"

The political reluctance is certainly predictable — telling people about a long-term existential threat like this is just not a job that your average politician, elected for a term of a few years, may want to tackle. For that matter, it’s a hard subject for the rest of us to think about intelligently.

Although the risk of coastal flooding is slowly worsening year by year, it’s true that the worst consequences of sea-level rise, if they ever materialize, are still a long way off. Most people simply have trouble contemplating risks to their great-grandchildren. We’re a lot more interested in our own skins!

(As proof, I will tell you that two Times editors came by my desk this morning wondering about the near-term risks to their homes in low-lying areas of Long Island.)...

The Web site of Climate Central, where these sea-level studies were mainly done, has a great deal more useful information, including the ability to search by ZIP code and get a sense of your own risk.

(Justin Gillis, The New York Times)

Which is to say: if you're doing science and you want to have an impact on public discourse, pubish a rigorous scientific paper in the New York Times, and no mistake. But also: let people search for their own zip code, because what's personal matters.

Also: when the New York Times puts you on their front page, a couple dozen other news outlets do the same, and both Al Gore and Tim O'Reilly link to your stuff, it's probably a sign of two things: a) the alpha nerds are paying attention, and b) you're about to have a big traffic day.

At times on Wednesday the Climate Central computer servers were overloaded, so if you have trouble getting the search to work, try again a while later. (NYT)

Ahem.

View Project.

Continue reading "Surging Seas: sea level rise in your community"

Feb 21, 2012

Stamens Out & About

This past January saw the first meeting of ConvergeSF, which hosts events to explore the intersection of design, art and technology here in San Francisco. Stamen's resident mathematician, Rachel - (how cool is that?) - presented along with Doug Winnie from Lynda.com.

After many years of working in Flash, Stamen has been steadily moving towards a HTML5/JavaScript toolset for mapping and visualization. In her talk, Rachel outlined some examples of best work sans Flash, explaining how JavaScript is more effective than Flash in a lot of ways, but still catching up in others. Here are the slides from her talk.

And while slides are a good record of the main points of any talk, I wanted to hear more directly from Rachel, so I asked her a few questions to follow up...

George: What do you think is the main reason people have moved away from Flash over the past few years?

Rachel: I think that there's a couple of different reasons: Apple stopped supporting it, which became a huge push away from Flash and into JS. Talking with other people who used to work in Flash, it was almost as if Flash was becoming a bit of a dead end. It wasn't being actively improved or developed - it was more or less static on all platforms. Javascript is just much more flexible.

G: What's your favourite Stamen HTML5/JS project?

R: My favourite pet project is the European Music Awards [Twitter Tracker].

G: Is that because you got to meet The Hoff?

R: Yes.

[The EMA site] is the nicest thing that I've made here at Stamen so far. One of the major hurdles that we've had is getting the motion to work as well as it did in Flash. I think that the EMA site was great in terms of creating constant ambient motion that was interesting and fluid. The animations are short enough to be interesting, and long enough to hold a narrative... The new Esquire project at http://migration.stamen.com/ is great too - it's so fast, so responsive.

G: Stamen has been using a variety of JS libraries like d3.js and paper.js on projects here, but I understand you've been doing a bit of research around new potential tools we could be using. What have you discovered?

R: I guess the main thing that everyone's talking about and trying to figure out how to use would be WebGL and specifically three.js. I am a bit of a WebGL curmudgeon, though, because it doesn't work and crashes all the time. The success rate is too low for me to be excited. It's a different way of thinking about objects, primarily built out for game rendering and environments. You build an object then color and shade it, then look at it. This isn't necessarily what I'm interested in on the web. Alien masks, shading, light sources...? Make a scene then move the camera around?

I'm more excited about building things that people can play with, interact with and change. Seems like you can simulate that with WebGL, but that's not what it's best at.

Sencha is another JS library that offers UI and animations and recognizes different touch events. Then you can write JS to respond to that. Finger is not longer just mouse pointer, but we can start poking at gesture support. Fun to think about websites as mobile native applications...

G: Thanks, Rachel! Holy crap, there are some braniacs around here!! Is it OK if I call you a brainiac?

R: Yes.

There are a few other things Stamen is, or has been, out and about doing:

• On January 23, Mike & Eric gave a presentation at Code for America about Data Visualization as part of the Big Data for the Public Good seminar series. You can watch videos of those presentations on Greenplum.
• Mike & Shawn have been teaching a Visualizing and Mapping Data course at the Grey Area Foundation for the Arts. This round of classes is about to finish up, but there's talk of another run if there's interest.
• Rachel is presenting at Designers and Geeks, trying to convince you that "The Future will be made of Screens" on Thursday, February 23 at 7pm. Update, March 2, 2012: Here are Rachel's slides from that presentation.
• I'm headed to SxSW in March to be on a panel about "Creating an Internet of Entities" with Tyler Bell from Factual, Drew Vogel from the Sunlight Foundation and Pete Warden from Jetpack. We'll be talking about the difficulty of finding resolute entities (like, say, a person) in the ocean of data we find ourselves in, and how important it is to give these entities a place to call home if you do manage to find one. That talk is on Tuesday, March 13 at 11am. I'm also looking forward to enjoying a few Shiner Bocks and as much barbecue as any one young lady should eat.
• Eric is sitting on the jury for the Cooper-Hewitt's National Design Awards, so will be in New York City March 12-13 (missing out on the barbecue in Austin).

In the coming weeks, I'll be reporting more from the trenches, as it were, in the form of a quick video or another interview or a screenshot and a story about some work in progress. Stay tuned!

Continue reading "Stamens Out & About"

Feb 13, 2012

Esquire: where the maps come from

We keep detailed project blogs for the duration of all our projects, where we post work-in-progress, links to related material, and so forth. We do this both as a way to share with our clients where things are at, but also as a way of maintaining a record of the thinking that went into the work (after all, "You can control time when you can see it."). I've often felt a sense of sadness that it's only the final piece that sees the light of day; there's a lightness to the experimentation that goes into the early parts of projects, when you're not worried so much about final implementation and instead can just play. We're going to start exposing some of this process, and this post is about the thinking that went into http://migration.stamen.com/, a recent project for Esquire Magazine.

Slicing & dicing

We started thinking about different ways to slice through the country. 1&, 5%, 99% are all in the news a lot lately, as is the idea that the American Dream of work hard & save your money & get a house & you'll be fine is true for less and less people all the time.

Our first idea was to break up all the zip codes across the country into different forms, based on demographics. Kind of like Jenny Odell's collages of [tankers from google maps]:

But instead of ships, there'd be the shapes of all the zip codes where, say, more that 10% of all homes are in foreclosure. I started sketching out maps of where some number of people have lost their jobs, or where the economy is strong; some aspect of economic life that matters to people now. And then, perhaps, you could arrange those back into a more visually-like-the-US map:

Slicing & splicing

We thought about a different kind of slicing: take a latitude line across the country, and find all the towns along that line. Every time you get to a town, you measure a series of demographics: age, income, education.

Stack enough of these on top of one another, you start to see patterns in the way the country is arranged: places with high populations of young people and lots of poverty, right next to places with the opposite. You get a literal slice through the country.

Maybe those lines aren't just latitude or longitude lines. Maybe they're lines along roads from one place to another. Find the poorest places in America, plot the routes between them, map obesity along the way:

Reverse this idea: instead of starting from one poor place and driving to another, find a route that goes only through poor places. Would you be able to get from Allen, South Dakota to Elmo, Montana, only driving through [poor places]? What would those routes look like?

How far could you get, if you could only drive through towns where the majority of people who lived there are under 40? Are there age sheds, just like there are watersheds and foodsheds?

(map by [Ryan Alexander])

Comparing rich to poor, we might find that some of these routes overlap quite closely; or that they never touch at all.

Demographic isobars

We could start to think of these routes as weather fronts: places that push up against one another without quite touching, but which affect each other as they roll past:

Maps of where the haves and have-nots live and work might start to emerge as distinct patters of relationships, depending on how you turned the dials. The 1% and the 5% might have more in common than they think. Or not; depending. Let's find out! Also, George has just pointed out to me that "iso chubbs" is not nearly as neutral a term as I had thought when I wrote it down, so that's a thing.

First stabs

First, Mike plotted the routes people likely use to leave California, and where they end up:

Second, Jeff did this for all the roads in the US that people have moved along; thicken them by how often they're used (and note the crazily-well-traveled road up to Alaska):

Compare the roads that the top 1% of the money travels along:

to the roads the bottom 1% of money travels along. Notice that even though the amounts of $ are the same in both graphs, the road networks are a lot more extensive in the second, because there are alot more people moving at the lower levels of the scale:

Testing, testing

George and Geraldine started thinking about how these maps might overlay and interact with one another, and came up with a couple different ideas that we liked:

Dialing back

Ultimately, though, none of these were as satisfyingly crisp and direct as Jeff's original sketches of the richest and poorest 35 counties, respectively. This idea of little archipelagos clustered along major travel routes, and the non-intersection of rich and poor, was more what we were looking for:

And so

At some point Mike wrote "Can you make, like, a hundred more?"

LIMIT 35 OFFSET 35, LIMIT 35 OFFSET 70, LIMIT 35 OFFSET 105

and we were off and running. The final piece lets you move through the whole range from the top 1% to the bottom, and the different constellations and nooks and crannies of the moving American economic landscape are laid out like cracks in so much financial ice.

More at http://migration.stamen.com/

Continue reading "Esquire: where the maps come from"

Feb 10, 2012

New Work: The United States of 2012 for Esquire Magazine

Last year, we were challenged by Esquire magazine to re-imagine a map of America to depict the country in a new light. That challenge has resulted in our first new work for this year: a piece called WHERE DOES THE MONEY GO? You can read Esquire's article on the project and see the other contributions.

By combining migration data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) with route information from MapQuest Open, we were able to show population movement alongside income flow, resulting in thousands of different images of the 48 contiguous US States, organized left to right by county-level income lost to gained.

Having just joined Stamen, this project was an excellent first crack for me for a few different reasons: 1) The project passed around the studio like a plate in a kitchen, with different people preparing different parts of the whole; 2) I was able to get a sudden, detailed look at the geography of the USA, useful given that I'm Australian! Did you know there are 3,143 counties? Or that Michigan looks like it's cut in two? 3) I witnessed some serious cartographic, javascript-y, and data massage-y dexterity, and 4) I'm finally on the inside (mwahaha!), so was able to participate in the delicious evolution of a project, watching sketches being made with data, being tossed or surviving, being refined and perfected.

To help prepare this post, I asked around the studio to uncover any insights or stories people found as they worked on the project. It's these observations that mould the shape of the end result, but often lay silent once the project goes live. This is something I hope to deliberately listen to and share in future projects at the studio, because I think it's a glimpse into the minds of the craftspeople here.

Eric was struck by how this map can show you the USA from so many different angles. Noticing that different people use different routes to travel across the country, he remarked that "if you live in one of these places where a lot of people are moving into, you're probably around people from a lot of different places, so your map of the country is really different."

As I moved the slider from one side to the other, it became obvious how migration across the country was oddly parallel to the movement of money. At each outer edge, people seem to travel further, and in the middle of the country, paths from old to new home seem shorter, and the map starts to break into more abstract archipelagos.

At the mid-point, where in some cases neither income nor population shifted, the map is quiet:

Mike picked up on the fact that most of the big cities in the US - Los Angeles, Chicago, New York - are in counties that lost the most income overall. "In a way, these cities aren't really losers at all. It's more like they're the major exporters of the country." When we use language like loss or gain, it implies some kind of failure, but in this case, we're describing money movement, not necessarily the "biggest losers."

There were a couple of stories that stood out for me. Florida appears to be gaining both income and population. Of the 80 wealthiest counties on the scale (that's the top 2%), 19 of those are in Florida, and the average income per household moving there is about $53,000. The national poverty threshold for a four-person household in 2009 was $21,954. (The source for that number is this census.gov "Poverty Thresholds by Size of Family Unit: 1980 to 2009" PDF report.)

I also spotted Orleans Parish in Lousiana, where Hurricane Katrina hit so hard back in 2005, but was experiencing substantial growth in 2010, with an influx of $146 million in income, and 10,594 new souls.

All in all, a great start to an exciting year. Enjoy exploring this different America!

Continue reading "New Work: The United States of 2012 for Esquire Magazine"

Jan 30, 2012

How we grew in 2011

We added six(!) amazing people to our team last year, which brings us up to thirteen. As I've got two days left in the first month of 2012, I thought I'd take a crack at welcoming our new collaborators in public. The studio has a longish history of encouraging its members to turn their personal interests in to commercially relevant opportunities—sometimes we even say that this is what Stamen is for—and I'm excited to see what kind of impact our newest colleagues are going to have on Stamen output in the coming weeks, months and (if I'm lucky) years.

Bill Conneely is our new head of Operations and Finance. Formerly at the New York Times, he brings us the ability to look at the studio from a business perspective and keep things running and growing smoothly. I've always sworn that Stamen will never have an HR department, and I intend to keep that promise—but a team of 13 people with health insurance who participate in a profit sharing arrangement needs more structure than I'm good at maintaining, and Bill is heading that process.

George Oates comes to us from Flickr, where she was head designer, by way of the Internet Archive. I'll continue to be involved in all our projects as Creative Director, but we've grown to the point where we needed a cracking Art Director to oversee the look of things, and George is the best I know.

Michael Evans is a familiar face from our close involvement with Code for America, who started life in our studio (which seemed awfully large at the time, though this is changing as we fill in and the plants get bigger). He's working closely with Stamen partner and CTO Mike Migurski on the technical infrastructures that make everything else possible, and we're looking forward to helping with his work on the Open311 Dashboard he pioneered at CfA.

Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso is our first professional cartographer. We've been familiar with his work at National Geographic and The Washington Post for some time now, and we're proud to be added to the list of sponsors of his amazing Natural Earth Project.

We've hired our first trained geometer, cryptographer and locigican in Rachel Binx. She's been blogging about her work on projects like the MTV twitter trackers at bit over at rachelbinx.com, has changed her hair color twice since we met her, and has us dancing around the studio interacting with the Kinect experiments she developed at the Art & Code festival at Carnegie Mellon.

And last but not least (this list is alphabetical), Zach Watson came to us after a stint at Seed Media Group. We were familiar with his work from a project he took on with Stamen alum Sha Hwang on the Center for Urban Pedagogy's Envisioning Development project, and he's been mapping up a storm on projects for the California Health Care Foundation and some projects that Tim O'Reilly got a sneak peak at the other day.

I'm thrilled about all this, as you can probably imagine. We're able to engage at a whole different level than we could even a year ago. On the whole it feels like we're a more, well, professional group than we've ever been, in the sense that the studio these days feel less like a couple of guys smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in a room trying to figure out what to do next, and more like a real company that pays its bills on time and can think strategically about the present and the future. More of us are coming from places where this kind of work has been done before, people have actual qualifications to do math and cartography and art direction (unlike me), we have several people now who are familiar with the intense time demands of designing for a 24 hour news cycle.

My personal hope for 2012 is to better learn to get out of the way of this incredible group as it does its work, while continuing to lead the creative and business end of things. Having Bill and George, in particular, in Director-level positions means that there are even more parts of the business I can know are being handled, which frees me up to do more of what I like to do.

I'm really looking forward to it!

Continue reading "How we grew in 2011"

Jan 18, 2012

What we did in 2011

This last year was a busy one at the studio; good and full, but often busy enough that we were moving too fast to talk about what we did. Which is a shame, because I'm proud of all of it. Having spent the last week or so getting the screenshots together (and doing a few other things as well), I'm finally in a position to actually look at all of it in one place and gather some thoughts. As the number of projects we get involved with grows, it's getting harder to keep a handle on things! But lots of fun.

2011 was the year data visualization and custom mapping moved firmly into the mainstream of digital design work, and our client roster at least partially reflects this trend. We also saw two major museums recognize this kind of work, signaling a growing understanding that this work is moving from the realms of research into genre. Open source projects continued to be a major source of interest and value for our projects, client-facing and otherwise. And we took two first quiet steps into product design based on open data, both directly supporting the efforts of the mapping volunteers at Open Street Map, whose efforts are increasingly being seen as a reliable alternative to propietary geographic solutions. This kind of effort, where we can do good and earn money at the same time, is core to the studio's practice and I'm delighted to be able to still be in a position to support it, ten years on.

So without further ado, this is what we've been up to:

Oprah Winfrey Network: Oprah's Life Class

We designed and built an [interactive companion] to Oprah's return to network television, [Oprah's Life Class]. Class participants used Twitter to post answers to class questions, Oprah favorited the answers she liked the best, a live map showed participants the global nature of the event they were participating in, and Oprah used the piece during a series of live webcasts following the show.

FCC: Broadband Map of the US

[Broadbandmap.gov] collects internet connection data across the US. Funded by the FCC, the project lets viewers compare [connection type], [actual speeds versus those advertised], [availability compared to demographics], and other aspects of their broadband coverage. Working as a subcontractor to Computech, Inc. of Bethesda Maryland, we developed two of the maps found in the map gallery on the National Broadband Map website.

MapQuest: Map Equals Yes

We started off with Foodspotting data; investigating where people had posted food reviews. The project took a brief detour into replacing the names of places with the names of the most popular foods in those places—so "The Mission" became "Secret Breakfast Ice," and that was fun. Not every restaurant (or even city) has reviews, though and we started angling more towards images that showed where the data was instead of what the data was.

This turned into an interesting problem in its own right, and we ended up with maps of [where the buildings are, and only where the buildings are]. MapQuest's support of the OSM's XAPI makes it possible for others to do similar kinds of things with free public data, and the code for the project is open source and [freely available].

Paranormal Activity 3

A map and visualization letting people use Twitter to vote for which city they wanted Paranormal Activity 3 to be released early in. This was a whirlwind project with about a week from initial call to successful delivery, and one where all the [open source work we do] came in super handy. We designed a custom cartographic set (known as "spookymaps" in the studio), Houston took the prize for the highest number of tweets, and in the end PA3 turned out to be the top selling movie of the year.

Trip Advisor iPhone and Android Cartography

We developed artography designed specifically for Trip Advisors' apps for mobile devices, whose small size and high screen resolutions provide their own opportunities and challenges. These maps are themed to work with Trip Advisor branding & styling, and the typography reflects the neighborhood-by-neighborhood focus of their apps. The apps are available to [download from iTunes]

MixPanel Analytics

Live web analytics provider [MixPanel] asked us to provide visual design direction and implementation for a new product, User Activity Streams or Streams for short.

AirBnB

A set of maps for Airbnb.com, showing the explosive growth of the service since it started in 2008. Darker city blocks have less listings, brighter blocks have more. It's amazing to see how quickly some areas fill in as more and more people discover they can list their apartments—and to see which areas stay dark.

Walking Papers

[Walking Papers] saw continued use by the OSM community and was featured in two museum exhibitions this year: [Hyperlinks], at the [Art Institute of Chicago] and [Talk To Me] at [MoMA in New York]. We started working to extend the project for use in disaster relief scenarios (part of Mike's ongoing [Camp Roberts] adventures); more about this in the coming months.

National Geographic

Our first [iPad app], for National Geographic; an [interactive globe] of the world draped with NGS' iconic cartography; designed with the help of longtime Stamen collaborator [Ryan Alexander] (whose amazing [stereographic streetview] is lighting up the internets lately); one big wet sloppy kiss from Stamen to National Geographic's cartographers.

Knight News Challenge: CityTracking

The CItyTracking project is in mid-swing, with http://dotspotting.org seeing active use. This year we're going to pull the pieces together that we originally [started the project with]: Walking Papers v2, Crimespotting v2 (in particular tying Dotspotting to Crimespotting), Tile Farm (which is already live in [stealth mode] and has some [new tiles available on Mike's blog]), and continuing work on Dotspotting. Everything's [available for download on GitHub], and we gathered 40 planners and visualizers at the inaugural [Data Visualization and Cities] conference.

MTV

We covered three live awards show with MTV in 2011: the [Video Music Awards] and [Spike Awards] in Los Angeles, and the [European Music Awards] in Belfast. Some of the visualizations were straight up tweet volume trackers, others mapped celebrity tweets to where they were sitting in the venue, and others tracked interest in photographs of things like Beyonce's baby bump. Unfortunately, Rachel only [met David Hasselhof] at one of the shows, so we're going to try and work on fixing that in the coming year.

Video Music Awards, August

European Music Awards, November

Spike Awards, December

California Healthcare Foundation

We designed two maps for the [California Health Care Foundation], a group that works to improve access to health care information in the state. The first, [All Over the Map], tracks the relative rates of elective procedures like [heart surgery] and [knee replacements], and the second tracks the rates of [surgical site infections] across the state. We're continuing to explore the possibilities of custom cartography with this work; the size of town names, for example, are sized not by how large they are but by [how much surgery is happening there].

VPRO

A custom [cartographic and interactive suite] for Dutch broadcasting heavies [VPRO] (sort of a cross between Channel 4 in the UK and PBS in the US), to accompany the [Nederland van Boven] TV broadcast this year. The background maps are loosely based on the [toner cartography] we developed for the Knight News Challenge, with some snazzy additions (when did you ever see all-lowercase labels?) and icons as part of our continuing contribution to Nate Kelso's [Natural Earth project].

The Museum of Modern Art: Talk To Me

We designed and built the [online interactive bit] of the full-bore art and culture extravaganza that was the MoMA's [Talk To Me] show. Two Stamen projects, [Walking Papers] and [Prettymaps], were [ http://content.stamen.com/photos_from_the_moma_show part of] [the exhibition].

One.org

A data visualization for [One.org], tracking the G8 and EU's spending commitments to Africa. The site represents each member country as a [flag-filled circle], sized according to the relative size of that country's contribution.

Transit Maps for MIG

The [OneBayArea Travel Map] shows you approximately how far you can get from any point in the Bay Area by car, public transit, bike, or on foot, at [particular times of the day].

Mondo Window

[Mondo Window], a site for in-flight wifi-enabled travelers, lets you look out the window of a plane and know what you're seeing on the ground. The site has been growing and changing since we helped launch it in April and was written up in the [New York Times] earlier this year.

PrettyMaps on 20x200

Last year's prettymaps project saw a different kind of distribution than is usual for us: you can order physical prints of several of the maps on Jen Bekman's fabulous 20x200.com. The prints are sized according to price, making art affordable for almost everyone. The project benefits the Open Street Map community too; all profits are used to support the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.

SoftCities: Custom Map Textiles

Our second foray into product design in 2011 took a more, well, tailored turn: SoftCities pulls open data together with fashion design and lets people buy blankets and napkins based on Open Street Map data. The most exciting part about all of this to me (aside from a percentage of the profits going to the Open Street Map project, and that I get to work with my wife Nikki Gunn on a project) is that people are now contributing to OSM specifically to have those roads and stores show up on tangible objects that they can see and hold.

All right, that's enough of that. Happy 2012, everybody!

Continue reading "What we did in 2011"

Dec 10, 2011

MTV Spike Awards, live Twitter Tracker

Aaaaaand, we're back, with another live twitter tracker, this time for MTV's Spike Awards, being held now in LA. Instead of celebrities, we're mostly tracking video game titles, and this means we can take a longer, leaner approach to the visuals than we normally can. And so: a full-width approach, with artwork from the games sized according to volume over time.

The interface gives a nod to the bzzzzt that shows up when something's wrong with the live feed in video games. The more you play with it, the worse this gets; kudos to MTV for letting us riff off of old video games in a presentation of this thoroughly modern phenomenon.

View Project

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Dec 7, 2011

California Health Care Foundation

It's been a productive couple of months here at the studio, so much so that it's been difficult to find the time to blog about projects as they happen. We've added some new people, for one thing, and started to really get our hands around the operations side of the business. Which is great—but I'm now sitting on a serious backlock of communicating about the work we've been doing, and it's time to change that. I'm going to try and tackle these one project at a time over the next couple of days; hopefully I'll be caught up by the time we close for the last two weeks in December.

In late September we published some work with the California Health Care Foundation, mapping variations in Elective Procedure Rates across the state. In English, this means we looked at how likely people are to do things like have their gall bladders removed—surgery that's not done to immediately save their lives—depending on where they live.

It turns out that, all other things being equal, that there's quite a bit of variability across the state, depending on procedure. CHCF adjusts for demographics in a given HSA (Hospital Service Area), factoring out things like the age and income levels of the people that live there. Oroville, for example, has more than twice the number of gall bladder removals done than the statewide average:

And in Clearlake, you're more than 5 times more likely to have heart surgery than in the rest of the state. This report was picked up by several media outlets; turns out that Clearlake has an overenthusiastic heart surgery department (in addition to a population that smokes and drinks too much), but even factoring in people's lifestyle choices, the numbers just leap off the map:

Other procedures are less dramatically different from area to area, but there's still some variation, and these maps can start to serve as entry points into more detailed and nuanced conversations about why health care is so different from one place to another, even in an area as relatively homogeneous as the Bay Area. The whole point is to kill less people, and getting a grasp on how procedures vary from place to place is a good way to move the conversation further down that road.

The cartography for the project is custom, a modification of GeoIQ's acetate design that we built for them earlier this year. The sizes of city labels on most maps you see are based on the number of people that live there. Using Dymo, a placement script for map labels, we've gently subverted this so that the size of the town names reflects the number of procedures done in that town. By this measure, you can see that Clearlake, a small rural area, is basically off the charts:

OK. Killing less people. More to come.

Continue reading "California Health Care Foundation"

Nov 30, 2011

VPRO: Custom Cartography and The Netherlands From Above

Working closely with Dutch broadcasting heavies VPRO, yesterday we launched Nederland van Boven ("Netherlands from Above"), an interactive map of the Netherlands to accompany the forthcoming broadcast of a series of shows about this fascinating tiny country. As my friend Ben Cerveny is known to say: "New York started gentrifying in the 1970s, but Amsterdam started gentrifying in the 1790s," and the opportunity to design custom maps for a country that's essentially all infrastructure was one that we leapt at gladly.

The show runs in a series of episodes starting later this month, each addressing a different aspect of life in Holland. It starts with mobility, answering questions like "where can I live, if I work in Amsterdam and want to be able to finish the newspaper by the time I get to work on the train?" or "How far can I travel in two hours by public transport from Vlissingen?"

Upcoming episodes will deal with other ways of looking at the environment around you: examining the natural environment by comparing distances from buildings, open space, and the density of wild animals, the landscape of danger by examining rates of lightning strikes, flammable locations and the arrival times of ambulances, and the contours of the air around the country, looking at the density of birds, flght paths of planes and the highest places in the Netherlands.

The cartography for the project is custom-made for VPRO, designed to complement the channel's rich visual branding. Cities fill in based on a custom compilation we derived using a combination of NaturalEarthData and GeoNames sources, and and at lower zoom levels roads become visible and are drawn using data sourced from OpenStreetMap. On the most detailed zoom all roads are drawn and the arterial streets receive names. With roads come more place labels, now from OpenStreetMap and sized by population. Water bodies (black) are drawn using data from VPRO, as are park lands (black stipple pattern), airports, farm locations, pancake restaurants, neighborhood names, and zipcode shapes (the locations of pancake restaurants being as important to the Dutch as the locations of airports and farms, apparently).

The highlight layers are orange, because that's the national color of the Netherlands. Also, did you know that carrots are orange because that's the national color of the Netherlands; "in the 17th century, Dutch growers are thought to have cultivated orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange – who led the the struggle for Dutch independence." So: orange maps over custom OpenStreetMap cartography, a client who wanted to tell a story and was willing to stretch what it means to design a map, and a country made of canals and land claimed from the sea. Hoera!

And now, on to the rest of the rainbow:

View Project.

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Sep 12, 2011

HQ2 Week 96

It's been a busy summer, and we've got a few things to share.

We're hiring a Developer

We're ready to hire again! If this is you, or someone like you, get in touch, wouldja?

Stamen's work is a creative fusion of design and technology, front-end  and back-end. Behind the maps and visualizations in our projects are rivers and streams of changing information, and the practices supporting these flows are themselves in a state of constant change. We're looking for a candidate who can work with us in our San Francisco studio to advance the state of foundational technologies supporting the collection, processing and publication of big, live data, supporting a fast-paced client-focused production environment.
You'll be working with a small team of designers and engineers led by a creative director who will be looking to you to make their ideas feasible. You're excited by the possibility of cutting and bending data to fit it through the thin straw of the internet. You can look at a source of information and model it as resources, rows and columns, messages and queues. You have the programming experience necessary to write data processors and servers, the system administration experience to inhabit and actively guide a constantly-shifting technical environment of free & open source software, and the patience & grace to grant that PHP and spreadsheets might be appropriate tools when circumstances require the quick and the dirty.
You're up for the excitement of a continuous flow of new projects, and you're willing to try new things for the sake of learning and fun. You're able to work well with multiple inputs from a variety of sources: creative direction, technical direction, production expediency, and client feedback. You're friendly & courteous, good at finding ways to have fun under the pressure of deadlines, and you're OK with our carefully-selected and well-managed clients having the final say. 

There are some other, somewhat similar positions posted at FlowingData, so if this sounds interesting I'd encourage you to check them out as well. More on the position at http://stamen.com/hiring_developer/.

MTV #VMA 2011

Shawn, Mike and Rachel headed down to LA for our third Video Music Awards project for MTV, a real-time Twitter visualization that was used alongside and within the live TV broadcast. One of the great things about working for MTV is that they're always looking to do innovative things with their projects. In this case that meant a few new things (aside from the complete visual re-design):

• we shifted the display technology from Flash to HTML5 (sorry, Adobe, we loved you long time)
• Paparazzi, which tracked the live popularity of retreated celebrity images, including Beyonce's by-now-legendary announcement of her baby bump, which quickly took over the whole of time and space
• since we knew what celebrities were there, where they were sitting, and what their twitter accounts are, we could build a Hot Seat visualization of who was saying what and when
• the work was used as a backdrop to the show on the main stage of the event

The visualization is online at http://vma-twittertracker.mtv.com/live/.

A nice side effect of using HTML5 is that the project works on mobile devices as well, which lent a nice bit of contrast to seeing the same designs on a 4" iPhone screen and a 40' high display in the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles:

We Can Create, Auckland

In the middle of all this excitement I was on the other side of the planet in Auckland, New Zealand at We Can Create, a design conference put on by THECHURCH, talking about open data and exuberant cartography and iPad apps and all the usual goodness.

A highlight was being able to spend time with two of my long-time design heroes: Frank Kozik, whose amazing blend of punk rock and up-front commercial sensibilities puts him near the top of any list of designers to admire, and Thomas Roopert, whose amazing history with antirom and tomato (I know, right? how much cooler can you get) have landed him at a really interesting place taking advantage of the overlap between social media and television at the Rumpus Room. And meeting Morag Meyerscough and Eike König was a treat I won't soon forget; it was basically super fun to be in a room full of amazing design talent and dream about the future. I'm grateful in particular to THECHURCH for putting on such a classy show, you guys really have your act together.

State of the Map

Mike and Aaron spent this last weekend at State of the Map, the annual OpenStreetMap conference in Denver. You can take a look at Aaron's talk at http://sta.mn/hqk, and here are a couple memorable quotes from twitter about their talks:

schuyler: "If we held language to the same standard of accuracy as we hold maps, we would not have literature, humor, philosophy..."
StevenFeldman: "I don't want to live in a world where the pinnacle of our achievements are driving directions," says @thisisaaronland #sotm11 < Me neither
DeadlyiCoN@schuyler @thisisaaronland I can't imagine saying "this is one hilarious map!" and it being a good thing http://twitter.com/#!/DeadlyiCoN/status/113006843177091072

Someone also seems to have used Soft Cities, my wife Nikki's new venture making custom blankets and napkins from OpenStreetMap data, in a slide at the conference, so if anyone out there knows who's presenting in this photo, would you let me know?

Mapumental:

Our friends at MySociety have gotten further along in making the Mapumental work that we did with them live-er, and are offering limited-edition prints and embeds of the travel time isochrone maps. It's been a long time coming, and working with Tom Carden on the ways in which the data and display layers fit together was a really foundational time for the studio which continues to resonate forward, so I'm delighted to see this project start to see some sunlight. Some samples of the maps:

And that's what's going on!

Continue reading "HQ2 Week 96"

Aug 25, 2011

Come on, Irene

The hurricane tracker we designed for MSNBC a few years ago has been pressed back into service, with Hurricane Irene barreling up the East Coast with 115mph winds lashing the sea just east of Fort Lauderdale:

The crazy thing (for me, an ex-New Yorker) is that it looks like they might actually get some pretty serious winds as far north as New York:

Continue reading "Come on, Irene"

Aug 18, 2011

The World by National Geographic is live

The World, Stamen's first iPad app and our first project with the National Geographic Society, is available for download from Apple's app store today.

Yeah!

The heart of the app is a globe of (you guessed it) the world, with overlays of National Geographic's unmistakable cartography available for the different parts of the earth. Each of these maps can be layered over a reference, terrain or ocean globe, and you can mix and match the different styles as you like.

National Geographic has their act together in the map department, as you can imagine, and it was a great pleasure working with some of the best cartographers around (and classy too: I got a yellow border pin for my suit lapel as part of the deal). The maps are up to date, and just before launch we were glad to be able pull in a map for the newly formed Republic of South Sudan (which Google doesn't show yet on their maps almost a month later, nyah nyah):

NG's mapping style also allows for some really wonderful cartographic moments, like this example of Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateapokaiwhenuakitanatahu spilling out into Hawke's Bay:

It's easy to lament the move to online and digital mapping as being a move away from the tactility of paper maps; to pine for a time when decisions about line weight and printing layers mattered. One of the great pleasures of working on this project has been that the app allows for investigation of the cartographic decisions that National Geographic's map makers made even beyond what would be available in print without a loop. Jess Elder, our project sponsor at the Society, agreed early on to supply us with maps that had been generated at a minimum of 600dpi and in some cases as high as 2400 dpi (paper maps are generally around 300dpi).

So without too much effort you wind up being able to really get in there and see the kinds of decisions that go into the distinctive nature of these maps:

There's alot else happening in the app—nations, maps, and pictures too, and especially the ability to tweet, mail and post screenshots directly to Facebook—but I'll save those for a later post. From my perspective the project is basically one big wet sloppy kiss from Stamen to National Geographic's cartographers.

This project wouldn't have happened without the hard work of Ryan Alexander on the 3d spinny map action and Zain Memon on the back end. We usually don't call out individual people at Stamen—we're a collaborative studio and everyone has their role to play in contributing to each project—but in this case I'd be remiss if I neglected to mention the hard work that Jeff Easter put in to both learning iOS from scratch and pulling the whole experience together.

You can download the app here.

Continue reading "The World by National Geographic is live"

Jul 20, 2011

Eric Fischer's photos on Flickr

One of the great things about Eric Fischer's map experiments on Flickr is that he actually takes the time to geolocate everything. So if he's making, say, a map of where people tweet vs where they upload photos in Montreal, the photo will tell you that it was taken in Montreal. Or if it's he's scanning a plan for the freeway design of South Valley Freeway, Highland Avenue to Day Road (1959), it'll actually be in between Highland Avenue to Day Road.

Which means we can make maps in Dotspotting that look like this:

Eric Fischer's 'See Something or Say Something' photos from Flickr on Dotspotting

And like this:

Trafficways Plan for Santa Clara County California, January, 1959 by Eric Fischer on Dotspotting

(thanks to Sha Hwang for providing the impetus for this post)

Continue reading "Eric Fischer's photos on Flickr"