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When I first moved to San Francisco from Atlanta a few years ago, the first thing that struck me about the city (aside from the expensive everything) was the pace. People here go so fast, how can they possibly stop and smell the roses? Our speed at Stamen often reflects the pace of this city,...

Today is an exciting one: we’re pleased to announce that Stamen is offering a summer Fellowship! AND we’re doing it in partnership with longtime friends at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, along with Obscura Digital and Helios. This is a real opportunity for someone to come and work with us and Gray Area for...

What happens when you map the social media footprint of the great outdoors? Last month, Stamen launched parks.stamen.com, a project we created in partnership with the Electric Roadrunner Lab, with the goal of revealing the diversity of social media activity that happens inside parks and other open spaces in California. If you haven’t already looked...

Last Saturday Stamen hosted the Bay Area edition of the OpenStreetMap Spring Editathon, one of 10 locations across the country. We had nearly 40 people show up over the course of the day, all of them eager to help contribute to the development of OpenStreetMap, “the Wikipedia of Maps”. At Stamen we use OpenStreetMap data...

There’s something really lovely about carrying a new, sleek piece of technology in something that looks and feels like a book, and was made using old-school bookbinding methods. This old-meets-new quality of DODOcase is exactly why we at Stamen love them and are delighted to partner with them again! Just last year, Stamen’s maps appeared...

We’re delighted to be participating again in the American flagship OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map US, as both sponsors and speakers. Here’s the lineup for Saturday: 9:45 AM: Building Businesses Using OpenStreetMap by Eric Rodenbeck 4:30 PM: Teaching Mapping to Geographers by Stephanie May (Urban Mapping) & Alan McConchie And for Sunday: 11:30 AM:...

Today marks the official launch of parks.stamen.com, a project designed to highlight social media from parks and open spaces across California, created in partnership with Electric Roadrunner Lab. “Stories pour out of our parks every day. This project is a first step towards visualizing Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, and Foursquare content using the actual boundaries of...

In late February 2014 MtGox, one of the oldest Bitcoin exchanges, filed for bankruptcy protection. On March 9th a group posted a leak of MtGox data, which included the trading history of users from April 2011 to November 2013. We’ve been collaborating with Kai Chang & Mary Becica on some visualizations of this data; they’re...

Back in December, we launched a new map for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. The goal was to help people get to the parks and once there, around them, and to create a framework for Parks Conservancy staff, volunteers, and partners to add additional data and content as needed. At first, custom cartography wasn’t...

This post is a check on both our ambitions and our processes. The uses of data visualization are different according to whether the goal is to communicate a specific thought for a single moment, e.g. as a poster, or the goal is to provide a durable tool for social change. It should be mighty safe...