Stamen is offering classes in data visualization and web mapping at our Mission District studio…

| 05.12.16

Stamen is offering classes in data visualization and web mapping at our Mission District studio, ​starting in June 2016​! These two classes are the first of what we hope will be an ongoing series of classes for individuals and organizations to learn from our experts, at the seat of where Stamen has been practicing data...

OpenStreetMap past(s), OpenStreetMap future(s)

| 04.08.16

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...

Taking Missing Maps into the field in Ecuador and Peru

| 03.18.16

This is the first in a series of updates on Seth’s travels to map some of the poorest areas on earth by extending Field Papers, a project we’re working on with The American Red Cross and our friends at Spatial Dev. There’s a brief intro to that project here. Photo: Nick Hallahan We left DC...

Using Instagram and Open Data to Put the Public in Public Lands

| 03.17.16

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...

Patrolling Trails in OpenStreetMap

| 03.16.16

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...

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...

Constant Immigration in the Bay Area

| 03.09.16

This week, Stamen is taking part in TAKE THIS HAMMER: Art + Media Activism from the Bay Area at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The show, curated by Christian Frock, will bring together works of designers, activists, and community organizations to highlight current themes of activism in a place with a long legacy of citizen...

Visualizing the Past, Building Tools for the Future: Designing an Interactive Atlas of American…

| 02.29.16

Last week I gave a couple of presentations around the Bay Area about Stamen Design’s recent project American Panorama. https://twitter.com/jskdecker/status/702705476648067073?s=20 American Panorama is the result of more than a year of work with the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, and it’s extremely satisfying to finally get to share it with the world...

South Florida and Sea Level: The Case of Miami Beach

| 02.24.16

Charles Waldheim at Harvard’s Office for Urbanization was kind enough to invite me to give the closing remarks at a meeting yesterday of designers, architects, city planners and municipal leaders at Miami Beach on the topic of Miami Beach and sea level rise. It’s a great place to have this conversation, partly because the city...