What is the Connection Engine? The Congruence Engine (later renamed Connection Engine) is a three-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in efforts to digitally connect industrial heritage collections across the UK. Using advanced digital tools such as AI, it links museum objects, archives, photographs, and more, enabling historians and curators...
Stamen has been working with a team out of UCSF (University of San Francisco) Population Health and Health Equity to create and maintain their Health Atlas since 2019. You can read a bit about the initial launch in our blog post from 2020. In 2024 we had the opportunity to rebuild the Health Atlas and...
Stamen has had the pleasure of developing Mapping Historical New York with Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research since 2021. We’ve written about it a few times, including most recently last fall, but here we wanted to expand on the technical implementation behind one layer on the map. The map displays census data in New York...
In March 2023, we shared the initial release of a set of global basemaps we designed for Amazon Location Service. In 2024, we undertook a design refresh to improve upon the original release, adding more detail and contrast to the suite of maps Amazon provides. To celebrate the release, we are excited to walk you...
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...
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...
Maps are fascinating things that show us a world that is both deeply personal and excitingly unfamiliar. As professional cartographers, we understand the joy of browsing parts of the world where you’ve never been before, but we also know that the first thing people usually do when they see a map is to find their...
Has anything like this ever happened to you? It might not seem like it, but these stories are likely the impacts of a poor resource management decision. Ecosystems are composed of an extremely complicated web of plants, animals, microscopic organisms, fungi, people, precipitation, and so much more. When the abundance of one component changes, the...
Perhaps you’ve noticed over the past decade how that “once in a century” forest fire or hurricane seems to be appearing in the news more often than its name would imply. With temperatures increasing due to climate change, natural disasters are increasing in both frequency and intensity across the world. In these situations, it’s of...
Last Friday I had the pleasure of being hosted by Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Curators Matilda McQuaid, Andrea Lipps and Cindy Trope at a visit to Cooper Hewitt in New York City. They’ve acquired our watercolor maps into the permanent collection of the Smithsonian! And they’re on display in the galleries. So I called up my...