Midweek Maps Mashup

Stamen Design's gorgeous, free basemaps at risk, #MapPromptMonday starts next week, and Sarah Battersby speaks at the Tampa Bay Tableau User Group in January

My Dad might be partially to thank (or blame? 😂) for my career in data visualization. In 1984, when I was a first-grader at Immaculate Heart of Mary, he bought our family the original Apple Macintosh computer. (I’m currently clacking away at my new, satisfyingly noisy Daydream Mint-colored Logitech POP Keys keyboard — yes, I have the matching mouse — connected by Bluetooth to my MacBook Pro, still Team Apple after all these years.) In those days, my favorite reason to sit at the beige Macintosh was to create a map in MacPaint. Sometimes I made a map of a real place, but more likely one of a magical, fictitious location that was surely more fascinating than Baltimore.

Map of Baltimore, my hometown, made with Stamen’s Toner basemap and Adobe Illustrator.

---

Stamen Design in need of support to continue offering open source maps

🗾 Last month, for the fourth annual #30DayMapChallenge, I did create a map of Baltimore for Day 16’s prompt “Minimal” using Stamen’s Toner theme basemap and Adobe Illustrator. (This was my second year participating. See the other maps I created for this year’s challenge here.) This morning, I was pleasantly surprised to see my map of Charm City featured on Stamen’s blog post about the challenge, but very sad to learn that maintaining the free basemaps under a Creative Commons license is financially unsustainable for Stamen. Alan McConchie writes,

We are pleased to see our basemaps continuing to have such a long and critical role in the mapping ecosystem, we want to make it clear that these maps are definitely showing their age. We are a small design studio, and hosting these basemaps costs us a significant amount of money each year. Furthermore, we don’t have the time to give them the updates and maintenance that they deserve, making these services increasingly out-of-date and unreliable even as other alternatives proliferate.

In the meantime, we are pursuing every avenue we can to protect and preserve the legacy of these tiles. If you’ve got ideas on how to support these tiles and you want to get involved, please get in touch with us!

---

#MapPromptMonday debuts next week!

🗺 In happier map news, a new weekly social mapping project, #MapPromptMonday, begins next week, due to the organizing efforts of Devin Lea, a Detroit-based geographer. The first prompt is Region(s). It’s one of my 2023 goals to participate every week. 

---

Sarah Battersby to present at January meeting of Tampa Bay Tableau User Group

📆 Finally, I’d like to remind  (or inform)  you that Sarah Battersby, Principal Research Scientist at Tableau Research, will be joining the Tampa Bay Tableau User Group on January 12th to discuss how QGIS can enhance your spatial analysis and maps in Tableau. We meet virtually, so all are welcome to attend! You can RSVP here. Get a head start on the topic by checking out Sarah’s series of guest blog posts on The Flerlage Twins’ site.