A collection of all blog posts by Kelsey Taylor.

blog/Kelsey Taylor

Stamen at NACIS 2024

Kelsey Taylor | 11.14.24

The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) 2024 conference in Tacoma, WA was yet another fantastic gathering of cartographers, mappers, and map enthusiasts. Stamen was well-represented this year by Kelsey Taylor, Eric Brelsford, and Alan McConchie. This was a busy year for us – we presented five talks between the three of us! Now that...

Maps and visualizations we’re keeping an eye on for Election Day, Part 3: Down-ballot races and electoral math

Kelsey Taylor | 11.01.24

Welcome to the third and final part of our series on maps and data visualizations in advance of the 2024 U.S. General Election (if you’re just catching up, here are parts one and two). Today, we’ll close with discussion of Congressional races and the electoral college. I’m just a bill We’ve mostly discussed the presidential...

Maps and visualizations we’re keeping an eye on for Election Day, Part 2: Indicators

Kelsey Taylor | 10.31.24

Welcome to part two of our series on maps and data visualizations in advance of the 2024 U.S. General Election (if you missed it, here’s part one on polling). Today, we’re discussing other indicators of political outcomes, including money in politics, changing demographics, key issues, and previous elections. Here comes the money Politics is all...

Maps and visualizations we’re keeping an eye on for Election Day, Part 1: Polling

Kelsey Taylor | 10.30.24

This is a perfect encapsulation of how we’re all feeling: unsettled. The presidential race has been neck-and-neck for months, even before President Biden decided to step off the ticket back in July. As the 2024 general election approaches, we thought we’d dig into some maps and visualizations of election data from across the media landscape...

Telling the Story of Changing Populations With Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas

Kelsey Taylor | 10.24.24

Content in this post comes from our presentation at the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) 2024 Annual Meeting last week in Tacoma, WA. Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas visualizes New York City’s transformations during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries both in terms of population and landscape. Drawing on 1850, 1880, 1910, and...

Using interactivity and animation to bring data-driven mocks to life

Kelsey Taylor | 10.10.24

As designers, our imaginations are the most powerful tools in our toolkit. They help us bring static mocks to life by thinking about how a user might interact with our ideas. Imagination can also hold us back sometimes, as it can be very challenging to communicate these interactions to others. It can also only get...

The World of Ice and Fire in Maps

Kelsey Taylor | 06.14.24

As self-proclaimed map nerds, there’s nothing like a crossover of nerdy subjects to provoke thought and discussion at Stamen. The new season of House of the Dragon premieres this Sunday, June 16 on HBO and Max in the U.S. and we thought this would be the perfect moment to finally talk about cartography in The...

Pulling back the curtain on economic disparity with the Distressed Communities Index

Kelsey Taylor | 03.26.24

In August 2023, Stamen started working with the Economic Innovation Group (EIG), a bipartisan public policy organization dedicated to forging a more dynamic and inclusive American economy. The focus of our work was their keystone product, the Distressed Communities Index (DCI) interactive dashboard.  The DCI highlights economic disparities in U.S. communities at several geographic levels,...

Visualizing Japanese American Confinement with Densho

Kelsey Taylor | 12.19.23

Back in 2021, Stamen began working with Densho, a nonprofit committed to documenting the oral histories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated on American soil during WWII. Together, we worked to tell the stories of the 125,000 imprisoned individuals through a map-based visualization called Sites of Shame.  In 2023, we collaborated again to develop Manzanar...

Stamen x Stadia series: Terrain behind the scenes

Kelsey Taylor | 10.17.23

When we started thinking about how to recreate Stamen’s iconic Toner and Terrain raster styles with vector data, Toner seemed like it would present the bigger challenge. Achieving the right hierarchy and visual balance of that style felt like a monumental task to me, an ardent admirer of Toner for many years. Terrain was less...