Last year we got to pay several visits to David Rumsey’s amazing map library in his basement in San Francisco’s Cole Valley. At that time it was the country’s largest collection of maps in private hands. It was the coolest room in the whole damn world. David showing his map of rivers in Asia David...
New Tools for Research with UC BerkeleyExplore, Compare, Inspire! Most people know that the University of California at Berkeley is a world-class research university. Some folks have heard of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. But not so many people know that the university houses seven natural history museums which together hold 12 million specimens that...
In 2014, the Dalai Lama asked his friend, scientist Dr. Paul Ekman, to design him an Atlas of Human Emotion. His Holiness was intrigued by conversations that he and Paul had been having over the years about their different views on the subject of emotion. His Holiness comes, of course, from the Buddhist tradition. Paul’s...
I gave a talk at AAG last week, as part of a session about OpenStreetMap data analysis. [UPDATE: I gave a similar talk at State of the Map US in Seattle on July 23, 2016. You can watch the video on YouTube. UPDATE #2: Maurizio Napolitano translated this post into Italian!] Slides at http://sta.mn/dnp I...
A project with Stamen and National Geographic As a child, I dreamed of being a National Geographic photographer. What could be better than going exploring to find just the right perspective to help everyone appreciate and better understand this amazing world we call home. I never expected that I would partially realize this dream in...
CaliParks.org opens a door and listens to people being themselves outside This spring, CaliParks.org (a site I worked on with GreenInfo when I was still at Stamen Design) relaunched with a new look and a clear purpose: Highlight the thousands of photos pouring out of California’s parks every day. And it’s working amazingly well. I...
A how to guide (in the weeds, so to speak) Update on Tagging added March 25, 2016 The coverage of our efforts to mark prohibited trails prompted a fair amount of conversation on OpenStreetMap’s mailing lists (this message and following) and chat rooms. Based on community discussion there and elsewhere, the best solution for marking...
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...
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...