Shoals

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

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]
Open thresholds

They went too far, clearly.

Posted on January 18, 2013

In publishing the precise locations and names of all the permitted handgun owners in two New York Counties, the New York Journal-News has done a serious disservice to data journalists in particular. More broadly, they may have made things more difficult for the “Open Data” community at large. [Read More]
Secession & Racism: a Spatial Analysis

Posted on November 25, 2012

Can a state’s tendency toward racism determine it’s willingness to secede from Barack Obama’s America Maybe. There’s the short answer. The longer one follows, and please note the many qualifiers before you fire up the Troll-o-Matic 9000. [Read More]