For the past few months, we’ve been quietly working under a grant from the Knight Foundation to do something that no one seems to have done before: publicly compiling as many open-licensed, locally-created terrain data sets as possible to stitch together a global set. Esri, Mapbox, NASA,Google, Mapquest and others already make terrain maps available....
Last fall, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) reached out to Stamen to help with an exciting project: imagining the future of their museum collection API, which was in it’s very early stages. The ask was twofold: to do some initial experiments with the API to see what kinds of walls we hit, and...
All around the world, people are getting together for Instameets, where Instagrammers gather to take lovely, fabulously filtered square photos of the world around them. It had been a challenge to effectively and elegantly map this community activity, so Instagram reached out to us to help to them out with a new map of community...
There’s a story in the American nature-loving tradition that people go to the outdoors in part to get away from other people. Some people might even say that’s the main reason to go outside. We’re ever more certain, however, that in truth parks are social, people live their lives in them, and bringing together support...
Today we launched CaliParks.org for the state’s Parks Forward Commission. CaliParks.org is the first statewide parks search engine that brings together expert-level park boundary and management data with social media content from Instagram, Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare. Our mission was to create a statewide search engine for parks that would show you information about parks...
Ready to make lovely maps using open source data on an open source platform? Two new basemap styles — Positron and Dark Matter — are available from mapping platform CartoDB, waiting for you to make your own beautiful visualizations. CartoDB already has a suite of styles to choose from, but some of the ones using OpenStreetMap data were only...
This week, the California Healthcare Foundation (CHCF), a longtime Stamen client, released a completely redesigned and updated version of All Over the Map, a tool to help policymakers, health professionals, and concerned citizens discover variations in the prevalence of elective procedures across California. Why does such variation matter? Well, it turns out geography matters when...
Few things are more vital to a city than safe, accessible fresh water. More than 20% of the world’s population lives in areas where access to clean, fresh water is challenging. It’s obvious: Healthy cities need reliable clean water to thrive. But how do we achieve that critical goal of safe, secure water supplies for...
It’s no secret that the field of cartography has been going through some pretty serious change lately, and that a lot of this change is happening because of work being done here in the Bay Area. San Francisco-based nonprofit think tank SPUR has been tracking developments in the field and doing a lot to get...
Greetings from Berlin. Earlier this week I was in Turkey, where I’d spent the last week coordinating the install of our curation, Mapmaker Manifesto. The second Istanbul Design Biennial opened to the public on November 1. Produced by iKSV, one of Istanbul’s, if not Turkey’s, largest arts foundations, the event worked with over 50 artists,...