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We were in a client meeting yesterday, talking about the way we wanted a new project to be received by the intended audience, and Harold Fisk’s amazing maps of the course of the Mississippi over time came up. Am I the first to notice that this: has basically the same color scheme as Jeff Koons’...

When it comes to making maps online there are many tools available, but they all have one thing in common: Geographic coordinates go in and a two-dimensional image comes out. Converting from geographic coordinates (longitude,latitude) to pixel coordinates is accomplished via a map projection. Most of the tools made for online map making focus on facilitating the navigation...

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...

learning and teaching d3 together Learning d3.js and data visualization is a long and sometimes frustrating journey. First, there is the overwhelming amount of choice. From the tens of thousands of examples, to the hundreds of API functions and millions of ways you can combine them with SVG, Canvas or WebGL. Even if you can chart a course across this vast ocean you may find many icebergs lurking...

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...

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...

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...

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...