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...
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...
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...
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...
In the developed world, we take it for granted that every home or place of work has access to basic infrastructure and services. This includes clean water, electricity, sanitation, and access for emergency vehicles in case of need. But this is far from being the rule in many developing cities. It’s a particularly stark challenge...
On April 11 and 12, the Interior Department held its first-ever hackathon. The topic was one that’s close to our hearts: Parks! The myAmerica Dev Summit attracted people from all over the country interested in parks and code, and especially the new Recreation Information Database API (RIDB). Two Stamen folks went to the hackathon and...
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...