Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Archive for June 2009

Interviews! Everything!

In Weblog on 12 June 2009 tagged interviews, stamen, where 2.0, wherecamp, Work with no comments

This week, Eric and Geraldine updated the Stamen homepage to include a list of Everything, Everything and Kicker Studio's Jennifer Bove posted an interview with me and Boris Anthony from Dopplr about information visualisation for Creativity Online.

Before that, but I've been slow to update, Tish Shute posted a long and detailed write-up of Where 2.0 and WhereCamp featuring a couple of quotes from me and a lot more from Aaron Cope.

js-vector-maps on github

In Weblog on 6 June 2009 tagged canvas, Code, github, javascript, mapnik, Maps, Open-Source, OpenStreetMap with 2 comments

I've been experimenting with some javascript classes that mimic the structure of mapnik's Layer/Style/Rule classes and render OSM data (via GeoJSON) to a <canvas> element. I've also finally taken a look at how github works, so I've decided to share the initial code there in case people are interested. If you don't want to check the code out for yourself there's a demo page here (tested in Firefox and Safari only, so far).

Historical Hurricanes & Oakland Crime

In Weblog on 2 June 2009 tagged crime, crimespotting, hurricanes, Maps, modest-maps, msnbc, oakland, stamen, Work with 2 comments

Continuing three years of exploration and development at the intersection of mapping and time; a quick post about two new things I've been working on at Stamen.

Last week we released a Historical Hurricane map for msnbc.com, a follow up to our forecast tracker from last year which was recently accepted into the SIGGRAPH Information Aesthetics showcase. You can read more about the historical map on the Stamen site, or just go ahead and explore the finished thing:

Further to our updates earlier last month, we just released another round of improvements to Oakland Crimespotting. Mike and Eric have full details. I'm particularly pleased that we're able to open up our archive of around two years worth of data, but also that we're able to try something new with an interface for filtering by time of day.

We jokingly started calling this a time pie, and now we're stuck with it... in a good way. I'm still not 100% sure it's intuitive, but I think that working the real sunrise and sunset times in there should help. The only comparable interface I could find was this:

If you know of any other similar ways of selecting/filtering 24 hours, let me know in the comments!