blog/Process

On the Right Trail

| 03.16.16

Turning bad social data into good information helps parks, the open mapping community, and salmon When we launched CaliParks.org, we created a custom base map especially to emphasize parks rather than the city names and highways that dominate most basic online maps. We made sure to pull all the park boundaries and names from the...

Parks + Technology = A Match Made in California

| 03.15.16

Just in time for Spring Break: A new version of CaliParks app puts 11,826 parks at your fingertips with crowd-sourced trails and millions of on-the-spot photos from Instagram Nature and technology might not seem like a good fit to some. But everyone needs to get outdoors more, especially kids. Now a new bilingual, mobile, web-based...

Mapping donations to #BestSchoolDay on The Huffington Post

| 03.09.16

http://www.donorschoose.org/ combines what’s great about the internet with the untapped potential of American schools. Schools that sign up for DonorsChoose.org can raise money, a dollar a time, from people anywhere on the internet. The Huffington Post is helping out by sponsoring and promoting the project, Stephen Colbert is helping out by doing a roll call...

Sightlines Project: Visualizing Living Well in 21st-Century America

| 02.19.16

We’ve been working with the Stanford Center on Longevity at Stanford University to bring to life their Sightlines Project. Stamen’s role was to review data from eight nationally representative, multi-year studies that involved more than 1.2 million Americans over the last 15 years and to visualize that data in an appealing and informative way. Sightlines...

Connecting environmental stories worldwide

| 12.15.15

The Earth Journalism Network, a project of Internews, has been working in geo-journalism for years. They stand out as leaders in using geo-spatial info to tell human stories. Because they are part of Internews, these stories cover crucial environmental, climatic, and political topics often for under-represented global voices. And their GeoJournalism team has also created...

On the right trail: Turning error into information helps both parks access and open data

| 12.15.15

When we launched CaliParks.org in February 2015, we also created a custom basemap especially to emphasize parks rather than the city names and highways that dominate most basic online maps. We made sure to pull all the park boundaries and names from the California Protected Areas Database (calands.org). That’s the nation’s most complete set of...

Patrolling Trails in OSM: How to do it (in the weeds, so to speak)

| 12.15.15

In a previous post, I described how we’ve carried out a first foray into trail curation on OpenStreetMap to deal with unauthorized trails appearing on the map. Rather than deleting them, we’ve changed their tags so they’re easily filtered out of the map but still present, so later mappers understand why those paths visible in...

Sea Level Rise: Mapping the future so we can make better choices today

| 12.15.15

Yesterday, we launched critical new work with our longtime partners at Climate Central: Mapping Choices lays out starkly the stakes of carbon emissions over the next several decades. It also shows us a much more sobering picture than is often shown in near-term climate change forecasts. That’s partly because this map isn’t about what will...

The City from the Valley

| 12.15.15

Fundamental shifts are underway in the relationship between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Historically, workers have lived in residential suburbs while commuting to work in the city. For Silicon Valley, however, the situation is reversed: many of the largest technology companies are based in suburbs, but look to recruit younger knowledge workers who are more...

American Panorama: a next generation atlas for the Digital Scholarship Lab

| 12.15.15

For the past year, we’ve been working in close collaboration with the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond to create a wide-ranging historical atlas for the 21st century. It’s called “American Panorama,” and it’s funded by the Mellon Foundation. Today, the DSL has launched “American Panorama,” and with them we’re releasing the application...