Shoals

An occasional blog about mapping, history, art, and technology

GeoASCII

A throwback mapping technique at the modern console

Posted on March 10, 2015

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time on Faraday’s remote servers, running one PostGIS operation after another in search of idealized geometries or custom market borders. In each case, I like to do a visual check to see that I haven’t created a node-sharing, topologically-laughable geo-monster before handing it... [Read More]
This is not a post about Ello

It’s about the political ecology of global agricultural systems, but Ello enables it.

Posted on December 1, 2014

Update: Since February I have indeed stopped this series of imagery posts to Ello. However, this has much to do with my lack of available time to locate, assess and process the images. It was a fun and finite project. [Read More]
Redistricting: A Question and a Query

Alert: Both policy AND technology will be discussed below. Bring both your brains. You’ve been warned.

Posted on November 14, 2014

My city is on the tail end of the country’s redistricting cycle. Somehow while Texas was marginalizing Latinos and Dennis Kucinich was getting scribbled out of his constituency, we here in Burlington were waffling over how to deal with triparty politics and the implications of our changing neighborhoods. [Read More]
Palm board and parchment

A history in cartographic tools

Posted on November 14, 2014

1998 [Read More]
Separation of Concerns

Working with shaded relief and satellite imagery in Mapbox Studio

Posted on August 24, 2014

I have a minor quibble. [Read More]
Constellations of Potential

How Google should be thinking about their rumored satellites if they aren’t already (but I bet they are)

Posted on June 2, 2014

About 10PM last night, I saw some interesting news dropped: [Read More]
Piano/Source

Posted on August 18, 2013

I remember the moment I realized I needed to learn how to play the piano. [Read More]
Tiled Basemaps Survey 2013 - Results!

Posted on August 6, 2013

The results are in! [Read More]