Location is Personal: Issue 1, January 2019
Introducing the Mapbox developer newsletter
By: Amy Lee Walton and Lo Bénichou
Location is embedded in the very fabric of our lives. Every day, we ask our friends, “Where are you?” We go from point A to point B, we get lost, we wander, we look for directions. So we started asking ourselves questions like: What does location mean to folks of a different gender? How does one’s experience effect the space around them and vice versa? Welcome to “Location is Personal.” This is the first installment of our monthly developer newsletter where we’ll share our thoughts on some of those questions and explore how the human experience informs the spatial experience.
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Amy Lee — One thing you learn about location being from Cincinnati is knowing where you are not. Specifically, learning that Cincinnati is not in Kentucky, Cincinnati is in Ohio. This fact is a bit more complicated than you’d think. Cincinnati is nestled in the Southwestern corner of Ohio with its full southern edge kissing the Ohio River, just North of Covington and Newport, Kentucky.
Zooming around the recent New York Times piece, A Map of Every Building in America, you can start to see parallels in the built structures that create this trifecta of the cities by the Ohio River. See, Northern Kentucky houses many popular Cincinnati spots including an aquarium, comedy club, pizza place, movie theatre, revolving restaurant, Waffle House, and even the Cincinnati Airport. We often skipped around the river into Kentucky to drive to my grandparents’ house in Sardinia, Ohio.
Because of this, I experience location by proximity — not only relating to a place by where it is, but by what it’s near as well. To get my bearings, I zoom out of a map far enough to see the full picture of a place. What’s nearby? Where’s the nearest body of water? Where am I currently facing? Where are we in the world? And in that moment, where do I go next? Lo, however, experiences location in a very different way.
San Francisco on the left. Paris on the right. Same zoom level.
Lo — When I first started exploring building footprints, I wondered if the feeling I had on the ground was reflected by the feeling I had looking at cities from above. I was raised in Paris, France and dense doesn’t even begin to describe the nooks and crannies that make up the city. But it’s not only physically dense, it’s historically rich. Once I moved to the West Coast of the US, walking 5 minutes in one direction felt radically different than walking 5 minutes in Paris. And the feeling remains when looking at those spaces from above.
Growing up where everything is smaller and tighter together influences your sense of size forever. I always feel more at home in cities where everything seems to overlap. You can check out your own cities like the folks over at MapTO did, by using this nifty little guide I wrote.
Amy Lee — I learned in Rebelle Rally that as long as you can find North, you’re never as lost as you think you are. Enter 2019, Readers. We’re facing the modernity of big data, public vs. private, aggregated insights, and misinformation everywhere, so… where is North? How can we find North for our products, our brands, and our industries? We bet it’s closer to the human experience than just meaningless data.
Welcome, Dear Reader, to the conversation. So how do you interpret locations you find yourself in? What experiences shaped how you navigate spaces today?
Share your stories and city maps on Twitter using #locationispersonal.
— Amy Lee Walton and Lo Bénichou
What we’re reading
- Bigger datasets, ambitious storytelling, immersive design, and lots of 3D — 18 maps that inspired us in 2018.
- Nieman Lab’s predictions for Journalism 2019 is worth your time, even if you’re not a journalist.
- Widespread Blurring of Satellite Images Reveals Secret Facilities — or when hiding in plain sight fails.
- In the last two decades, 13% of California has gone up in flames, according to the Huffington Post.
- The State of UX in 2019 — UX Trend’s predictions on the collective user experience industry and what to expect in 2019.
- The Walrus’ take on the end, as we know it — The future of exploration: In the age of Google Maps, what’s left to discover?
- In Geographical Data Visualization with Mapbox, Todd Birchard loves Mapbox — and we swear we didn’t pay him.
- What the future of micro-mobility and last mile logistics looks like,according to Tarani Duncan.
Who we’re following
- Derek Watkins, Graphics Editor at The New York Time Graphics
- Lauren Tierney, Graphics Reporter at Washington Post Graphics
- Chris Noessel, Design Lead and Educator at IBM Design
What we’re building
- Unlock context with our Tilequery API.
- Explore our new Worldviews feature — allowing you to change disputed borders dynamically based on a users’ locales.
- Build faster with our new and improved API docs.
- Discover new versions of our Streets, Outdoors, Light, Dark, and Satellite Streets map styles that now use a new version of our vector tiles.
- Calculate millions of traffic-aware routes in seconds with our new Predictive Large Matrix beta.
- Check out our traffic-aware ETAs and directions, now available in 161 countries and territories, and growing.
Developer Spotlight: Lee Martin
Lee Martin is a developer/designer that builds unique interactive experiences for musicians, music, and their fans. He’s also a gamer & interactive map maker. After playing the game, Lee designed a Red Dead Redemption-inspired map style & shared his design process in tweets and in a deep-dive tutorial. Lee also outlined how he built a simple real-life version of the RDR2-inspired compass with Mapbox GL JS.
