blog/Process

Digg Pics is live

| 01.04.08

Digg Pics is a dynamic visualization of images as people vote for them. Generally, when we work on a new visualization, we start with data that is already flowing, and look for interesting patterns or tendencies that already exist. In Digg’s case, this is usually a particularly fruitful process because of the tremendous volume and...

Splatter: now (re) available for download

| 11.20.07

Our belated apologies to all the people who’ve been asking for the source code for splatter for the last month or so — we upgraded our publishing software and some loose ends never got resolved. Splatter #1 The project page has been updated with a new link to the appropriate files, or you can download it here....

Digg Arc History

| 08.30.07

Digg Arc is the lastest addition to our continuing work for Digg Labs. The piece has seen several weeks of development and experimentation and three phases of development punctuated by two successive public releases. This is a visual diary of its creation, shared by Shawn Allen, Tom Carden, and me, Michal Migurski. Arc began in...

Data visualization, SOM, and the Transbay Tower in San Francisco

| 08.09.07

Craig Hartmann and Brian Lee, design partners in Skidmore, Owings and Merril’s San Francisco office, unveiled their proposal for the new Transbay Transit Center and Tower in downtown San Francisco to a standing-room-only audience at San Francisco City Hall on Monday night. SOM asked Stamen to provide a series of potential live visualizations for the...

Hindsight’s 20–20, as it turns out

| 07.11.07

Hindsight, our new project with Trulia, launched a week or so ago. Since then Tom and I have been slowly collecting particularly nice examples of interesting conditions as we find them, and Tom’s been posting some of these on the Hindsight blog. We’re starting to identify a certain language of development patterns as we go:...

Eddie Elliott’s Cab Spots

| 06.27.07

I’ve been talking a bit with Eddie Elliott, local designer/technologist and all-around raconteur whose beautiful digitial work predates the web, about Cabspotting lately. We (Stamen) keep meaning to get back to the project and do some new investigation, but something else (i.e. paid work that we like to do) keeps getting in the way. Eddie’s...

Announcing Modest Maps

| 03.23.07

Stamen’s Mike Migurski announced today the release of the mapping library that he and Shawn Allen and Darren David have been working on: Modest Maps. Following up on a series of map-based projects that improve on the full-screen tile-based system that Google Maps paved the way with (haha!), Modest Maps is an open source project...

A day of Diggs and a thin blue line

| 02.27.07

As a follow-up to the first visualizations we made of user activity on Digg (posted to the digg blog in 2006), we’ve widened the scope of our visualizations to show an entire day’s worth of digging activity on the site in greater detail. The resulting images, made by Tom Carden, illustrate some general patterns, and...

Stamen on Manyeyes

| 02.23.07

I was first introduced to IBM’s new Manyeyes project when Fernanda Viegas spoke about it at Adaptive Path’s excellent IDEA conference in Seattle back in October. We presented too; it was a “morning of visualization” 🙂 . Mike Migurski’s Digg friends Since it launched, the site has deservedly gotten a ton of attention and seems...

Amgen: Quokka redux

| 02.20.07

It lives: The 2007 Amgen Tour of California started this weekend. It looks like some of my former colleagues at Quokka who are now at Macromedia Adobe have been working on the realtime race tracker. Live Race Coverage Francis Potter from Adobe sent over the annoucement from Yottapixel: An engineering team at Adobe has been...