Personal website of Andrew Turner. Writings on geospatial collaboration, software engineering, Washington D.C., and other individual musings.
Last week I made a quick statement sharing my concern for civic organizations promoting ETL – Extract Transform and Load – of open data instead of developing APIs. I felt it warranted a more thorough response than the terseness of microbursts. Desire Lines and Road Surfaces Walk through most parks and any college campus you will quickly […]
This weekend I participated in a fun panel on Data Visualization as part of World Information Architecture Day in DC. The moderator was Sean Gonzalez from Data Community DC and included from Amy Cesal from Sunlight Foundation, and Maureen Linke and Brian Price from USA Today / Gannett Digital. You can see the video here. There was a clearly interesting gap between our perspectives as storytellers […]
A year ago I decided to become a bike commuter. I live on the east side of Washington, DC and we just opened our new office on the edge of the Potomac river on the west side of DC. Inspired by my colleagues in Portland that constantly tout the wonders of bicycling their fair city, I believe […]
People viscerally engage with their personal technology devices. Recent studies indicate that we spend 6.5 minutes of every hour awake with our phone, and even more time than we do with our partner. Anecdotally I have heard that we have mobile in our hand more often than we are wearing pants. Fortunately we adapt. At least in my […]
Last week I immersed myself deep in the culture and community of map design. The biennial gathering is the major cartography conference, International Cartographic Association world, held this year in historic Dresden, Germany. It was my first time with little awareness or expectation of the community, one that throughout the week I both enjoyed but also some […]
Aaron and I were discussing how the web facilitates inspiration and sometimes even copying of other sites or applications. This is a positive outcome of open access that can create evolutionary improvements. However in my experience I have also seen people clone an interface where they missed the larger context of the interaction, or even worse […]
As any parent I am constantly concerned about my child’s health. With data it is easier to identify emerging problems and also diagnose the underlying problem as a precaution rather than merely reactive. For these reasons we spent the past year on our Quantified Baby project. Throughout the year we have been maintaining various quantitative and […]
The technology and methodology of digital interactive cartography is nascent but evolving. The fields of human-computer interaction and GIS are converging from both the consumer market: “where is my nearest good restaurant?”, as well as from the enterprise: “where should I open a new restaurant chain?”. Designing useful interfaces requires understanding user workflows, iterative development […]
Earlier this week Google announced Keep, their new service for quickly storing notes from your phone and online. As others have pointed out, it’s similar to the popular Evernote. Feature comparisons aside, the launch of new services providing common, even essential, access to my information highlights a disconcerting trend. Faith in Services Underlying these product decisions is the manifestation of the […]
In 2007 at the beginning of the popular emergence of local maps and amidst a changing journalism industry, an innovative platform was launched that provided a uniquely local and up to date view of cities. Everyblock, a news feed for your neighborhood, was built as an open-source platform that used government open data feeds to […]
