Shoals

Better friendships through mapping technology

Posted on December 11, 2015

I have trouble getting together with friends these days. I’m not alone in this — distance is a surprising obstacle to maintaining relationships in the landscape of modern America. Can a hack-of-an-app help? [Read More]

Social Silos

In which I find a parallel universe in my own backyard

Posted on November 3, 2015

Upon the occasion of Halloween, and the need to optimize, I took a look at NextDoor for the first time. They apparently had some sort of dope candy-targeting map for every neighborhood, and since that’s my catnip I had to check it out. Step 1: sign up, because the candymap... [Read More]

The cartographer’s promised land

The new Mapbox Studio just went to private beta today. Here’s what I’ve learned using it.

Posted on September 17, 2015

There’s a lot of marketing behind the new Mapbox Studio, along with a glowing review in Wired. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to play with it for a few months now as it developed, and the Mapbox team should be proud. [Read More]

Caught in the Cartographic Crossfire

The work of a geographic vandal reminds us what’s missing from the map.

Posted on April 24, 2015

This morning Ahmad Babar noticed a curious feature on Google Maps just South of Rawalpindi, Pakistan: [Read More]

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]