Idea Lab

Colorful City Tracking Maps Launch Under Creative Commons

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Maps.stamen.com, the second installment of the City Tracking project funded by the Knight News Challenge, is live. These unique cartographic styles and tiles, based on data from Open Street Map, are available for the entire world, downloadable for use under a under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and free. takes deep breath There are three styles available: toner, terrain, and watercolor: Toner is about stripping online cartography down to its absolute essentials. It uses just black and white, describing a baseline that other kinds of data can be layered on. Stripping out any kind of color or image makes...

• March 28, 2012
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Dotspotting + Embeds = Great Maps of Prisons, Crime, Pavement Dots

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

There are three basic parts to working with online representations of urban civic data in Dotspotting: collating the data, manipulating it, and then sharing and publishing it. Up until now, we've been focused on the first two, which makes sense. Obviously you need to be able to gather and work with the data before you can share it. Today we're announcing the inclusion of the project's most requested feature: embedding the maps that people make into sites of their own. Dotspotting makes tools to help people gather data about cities and make that information more legible. It's the first project...

• July 20, 2011
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Dotspotting's 'Toner' Cartography Available for Download

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the central tenets of the Knight News Challenge grant for Citytracking was that the work would happen in public, and that we'd make the work public as we go. Citytracking presents digital data about cities that journalists and the public can easily grasp and use, and provides tools to let them distribute their own conclusions. Dotspotting is the first project Stamen released as part of Citytracking. The project has been downloadable on GitHub for some time now, and will continue to be so, and we're announcing today the availability of the source files for Toner, the online cartographic...

• June 29, 2011
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Dotspotting Launches to Help People Gather Data on Cities

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dotspotting.org is officially live, at long last! The project, which aims to make tools to help people gather data about cities and make that data more legible, has been in a partially completed stage for a few months now, and I've blogged about it before. We've got a few new things to announce as well: The url is now http://dotspotting.org; no more of this stamen subdomain stuff. The cartography is completely revised, with a severe black-and-white style we're calling toner, in a gentle nod to the halftone process that newspapers use. (The project is funded by the Knight News Challenge...

• June 20, 2011
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How Dotspotting Began with Colored Dots on Drains in San Francisco

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

In some ways you could say that the Dotspotting project started with San Francisco's sewage and drain system. A few years ago I started noticing some strange dot markings on the curbs of city sidewalks, directly above the storm drains like the one you see on the left But on closer inspection, it turned out they weren't just single dots. They seemed to be dots that had been applied, rubbed off a bit, and reapplied. Like Roman palimpsests, the curbs above drains looked like reusable canvasses -- but for dots, instead of edicts. The image below is one close-up example....

• March 15, 2011
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Dotspotting Expands to Track Homicides, Food Vendors, Road Trips

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since my last post, we've been busily working on extending the functionality of Dotspotting, the first project in our larger Citytracking project aimed at helping people tell stories about cities. It's still, as my colleague Aaron puts it, very much in a "super alpha-beta-disco-ball" state -- which mainly just means we don't want anyone to put data in there that they expect to keep -- but it's getting there. A few things have happened that I want to update you about: Import has been expanded from only accepting .csv files to include .gpx, .json, .kml, .rss and .xls files. Various...

• January 20, 2011
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Dotspotting Launches to Make City Data Mappable

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Dotspotting is the first project Stamen is releasing as part of Citytracking, a project funded by the Knight News Challenge. We're making tools to help people gather data about cities and make that data more legible. Our hope is to do this in a way that's simple enough for regular people to get involved, but robust enough for real research to happen along the way. There's currently a whole chain of elements involved in building digital civic infrastructure for the public, and these are represented by various Stamen projects and those of others. At the moment, the current hodgepodge...

• December 2, 2010
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Citytracking Presents Data on Cities for Maps, Visualizations

by Eric Rodenbeck
2010 Knight News Challenge Winner

Citytracking, one of this year's Knight News Challenge winners, will present digital data about cities that journalists and the public can easily grasp and use, and provide tools to let them distribute their own conclusions. We will build a series of tools to map and visualize data that is truly Internet-native and useful. The project will be: Simple enough that a fairly technical reporter who understands Google Maps and basic HTML can embed something good in their article/report/blog posts. Beautiful enough that an interested amateur citizen will find it useful and interesting. Complex enough to catch the attention of developers...

• November 3, 2010
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