Maps
“I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Since 2002, Stamen has been exploring online cartography in our client and research work. Maps are among the most easily accessible kinds of data visualization—put a point on a map, the bigger the dot, the more stuff that’s there, and you're done. They often suggest other kinds of displays, and can serve as a useful jumping off point for deeper conversations.
Stamen began our studies of maps close to home, with an exploration of the data-rich intersection where our studio is located, at 16thandmission in San Francisco.
Our first live map-based projects were produced for political action group MoveOn.org. 50,000 people came together in realtime in an online map-based visualization:
After the successful launch of a virtual town hall in 2004, we adapted what we had learned about geolocation to the recently-launched Flickr programming API, exploring the potential of automatically-geolocated photography in anticipation of ubiquitous GPS.
Mapping photos from flickr.com with Mappr
NARAL’s March on Washington tracked a quarter of a million participants, & gave them tools to share their experiences with one another via the map:
In 2006, we began working Exploratorium on a live GPS tracker, which tracks the positions of taxicabs in San Francisco. The resulting project, Cabspotting, continues to develop under the Exploratorium's Invisible Dynamics program.
Our most recent mapping work with online real estate giant Trulia focuses on the growth of cities in the United States, animating the results over time in a giant browsable framework.
Housing built on an artificial lake: Trulia