KnowWhere

A lot of the posts that we share on Mappery come via our social feeds at Mastodon and Bluesky as either an @ message or a hashtag #MapsintheWild. Up till now our workflow to turn the social posts into blog posts on Mappery was something like this: Check the note that we keep of where we finished in our last posting session Search the social platform for the next @ or # Download the image in the social post Copy the text of the post if it is relevant to quote Start a new post in our WordPress…

This might be a long post, it was a pretty challenging project. I wrote last week about my Amazing Animals in Crisis map of 50 endangered species, I got some bad news on Friday that my usage of the IUCN polygon data was in breach of their licencing conditions and a request that I take the map down, which I promptly did. This was a big disappointment as I was just about to expand the map to almost 400 species and now I had no data. Learning – even if data is apparently free and open, carefully…

I have been using Claude to help me build maps for a few months now and I have been very happy with the results which I think have been improving. I keep hearing about Claude Code and wondered what is the difference? The answer: a heck of a lot! Using Claude Chat (or any of the other chatbots) you can prompt the AI to write files for you, to write scripts and guide you in running them. That’s how I have been working up till now. Once you have given Claude Code the permissions to access your…

Maps in the Wild Mappery has been my side project for 8 years, for the last 5 or 6 years Arnaud Ferrand has been my co-editor and the tech brain that keeps the site running. Mappery is a large WordPress site with 2,500 posts and 3,500 images of Maps in the Wild (pictures of maps in the street, on clothes, furniture, alcohol etc). For several years we had a map plugin that allowed us to enter a coordinate pair for a post and to render a clustered map with pins representing each post, click on a…

After I published my map of defence spending a friend suggested that it would be interesting to see how things had changed since the end of the Cold War in 1990/91. I knew that the data I had covered a longer time period so I asked Claude if we could update the map and it checked the data and confirmed that there was reasonable data coverage back to the mid 70’s so I decided to backdate (or is it update?) the map to run from 1975 to 2024. What’s new The extended map now runs from 1975 to 2024,…

With Keir Starmer recently losing a Defence Secretary and then leaving a budgetary timebomb for his successor as PM, Andy Burnham, I thought it might be interesting to see how we rank on defence spending and who are the world’s largest exporters and importers of arms. I started out by trying to find some data on arm sales and Claude sent me to SIPRI where you can download very granular data on almost every transaction but after playing with the data I decided to take a simpler approach and map…

Thanks to Mario Ame Everything was working fine. I had just finished building the Grow Your Own allotments map, deployed it to the live server, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself. A few days later a friend messaged me that the map had stopped working. No regions, just a blank basemap. Checked the console and got this: “Server returned no content-length header or content-length exceeding request. Check that your storage backend supports HTTP Byte Serving.” Not the most helpful error…

The current outbreak of Ebola has inevitably encouraged lots of maps of the outbreak, just search for “Maps of the Ebola outbreak in Africa” and you will find something like this. Some of these are pretty good, some don’t communicate very well and a few are awful. My attention was drawn to a static map obviously generated by AI which was so so bad that it was laughable and you had to wonder why anyone share this without picking up the numerous obvious geographic errors, I wwonderedhat Claude…

I am struggling to come up with an idea for what to map next. A bit of a brain freeze. Have you got an idea? Leave a suggestion in the comments.

This morning there was a lot of amused banter amongst my geo-pals about the UK Government’s Fuel Finder API based on an article in The Times (possible paywall) on the problems with the data. You can download the data or access the api from the gov.uk site. I downloaded the data for this morning (31st […]

I was looking for a simpler project to build after my last couple which had proved more complicated than I had anticipated. I came up with the idea of mapping airports and finding some data on their environmental impact – good idea, but not so easy. Finding a dataset of airports was relatively easy, the […]