What I’ve been up to (outside of my work):

Setting up tech (registration, website updating/maintainence, and writing the content) for the 8th annual Jake’s Invitational.

If you’re looking to golf for a great cause in Northeast Ohio, check out the 8th Jake’s Invitational on August 9th.

We fund children’s futures by giving them financial aid to Lawrence School, a great place for students with learning differences.

Spending more time with open data.

Obtaining the data (especially local data) to be used in maps has been time-consuming. When exploring or thinking about different topics to understand through maps, I am limited by the data that is available.

This has led me to spend more time to advocate for and work with open data on a broader scale. I’ve been co-leading Open Cleveland which along with OpenNEO and Hack Cleveland has been the open data movement in Cleveland.

We’re educating local politicians and city employees that civic data they work with and manage can be useful if it’s available to the public like creating a web form so someone can apply online to take formal stewardship of the vacant lot next door to them.

Data alone won’t solve anything but it will make a lot of others’ jobs easier.

I didn’t submit a talk to NACIS this year. Do I regret it? Not yet. I might later.

I’ll share some Carto thoughts on animated temporal maps very briefly:

I’ve been thinking a little about animated temporal maps, maps whose features change based on a specific time. One examples

Torque by CartoDB is one easy to use library that is described to do temporal mapping. I haven’t seen as much use of Torque (or many temporal maps) in recent months on cartotalk on twitter.

I hadn’t thought of any use of torque either, until last week, visualizing over time, Cleveland’s building demolitions.

For the outsiders of Cleveland, yes, many of these were likely houses; it’s a visual representation of the housing crisis.

I was wondering how I could see it spread, what areas were hit hardest. I want to see different ways how this can be visualized.

This first visualization is just a proof of concept I got up and running; I’ve fiddled with torque’s API a little since then although not enough to write up for you just yet, will do soon. I am now sleepy.

Listening to Jean-Christian Arod - Detour Nostalgique. from the movie CRAZY. I fell in love with the song back in 05 or 06, and just rediscovered it earlier tonight, listening to it a few times on lop.