...so take it easy.

My name is Michal Migurski. I am the technology head at Stamen, a San Francisco design and development studio focused on data visualization and map-making. You might remember me from such recent projects as Oakland Crimespotting, Walking Papers, Maps From Scratch, Digg Labs and API, Modest Maps, Mappr, or Reblog. Below, you will find my weblog, tecznotes, my link blog (high-frequency, short posts), and with a collection of smaller and older things I've worked on.

Background photo by Fred.

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Apr 25, 2012 3:25pm

polygonize it

If you need to make a bag of polygons from a selection of OpenStreetMap data, you would think that simply running shapely.ops.polygonize on the selection of linestrings is enough. In fact, polygonize needs for the line endings to coincide, and may not work as you would expect with OSM data. I scratched my head over this a bit after successfully using polygonize to handle TIGER data, until it occurred to me that TIGER is built to have lots and lot of little lines.

The trick is to split each linestring input to polygonize() into all its constituent segments, and then let the function do the reassembly work for you. Creating the polygons of Amsterdam above from metropolitan extract roads took just a few seconds. Here’s the polygonize.py script that does it, expecting GeoJSON input and producing GeoJSON output.

comments (2) | permanent link | tecznotes

Apr 15, 2012 10:54pm

hachures

Hachures are an old way of representing relief on a map. They usually look a bit like this, and they’re usually hand-drawn:

I’ve been playing some some simple algorithmic ways to generate hachure patterns with input elevation data.

They’re rather New Aesthetic, with the regular-spaced grid based this pattern that encodes slope and aspect together:

You can align the marks with the slope, or across it (as with contour lines). The latter results in some pretty blocky-looking hills; my feelings about these are mixed:

I especially enjoy the smooth appearance of hills in San Francisco using the orientation along the slope. Things get even more interesting when minimal labels are added on top:

Also, good things happen at relative-low zoom levels, where the relative size of hills and marks gives everything a spiny, written-on appearance:

Have a look through a collection of renders for more examples.

comments (18) | permanent link | tecznotes

Apr 8, 2012 11:02pm

chicago-bound

Next weekend, I’m heading to Chicago to spend a week volunteering for the Obama 2012 campaign’s tech team. I’m very excited; it should be a fairly high pressure environment and I hope to have a number of opportunities to bring a bit of API design and basemap cartography love from San Francisco.

This election feels intuitively like the one that matters, the one where we prove that the past four years weren’t just a reactionary fluke. We had a round of flowers and sunshine last time around, but the President wasn’t running on much of a record. In 2012, he’s been in office for a full term, and a lot of people who were hoping to see a 180° turnaround from the Bush years were disappointed to discover that ours is a rough political landscape to navigate. Given the circumstances, I think Obama’s done a great job. Given the risk that supporters from 2008 might not be so excited this time around, I’m putting in extra energy to help assure that we can push this not-at-all-guaranteed election over the hump.

If you’re local to San Francisco and want to help, Catherine and Angus at the SF technology field office in SOMA are looking for your help.

comments (4) | permanent link | tecznotes

Apr 3, 2012 11:11pm

maps.stamen.com

We launched a thing last week. It was fairly well-received by people on the internet. A few people at Stamen who don’t normally write on the company blog wrote on the company blog: Zach talked about the blur/noise process behind the watercolor tiles, Geraldine explained all the work that went into the textures, and Jeff showed off some of his work logging tile usage on the site. I recapped a lot of my background work on Terrain, and then Cups And Cakes Bakery went and made it into cupcakes.

Paul Smith, who taught me how to install Mapnik a long time ago, did an interview with me about maps while slacking off from his day job. In it, I wrote a bunch of things that I think are interesting about online maps, which is a good thing because today I didn’t feel well and bailed on my Where 2.0 talk. Sorry about that—you didn’t miss anything, I was really unhappy with the talk I had prepared, which probably contributed to my morning.

Here are pictures:

comments | permanent link | tecznotes

Mar 19, 2012 1:00am

tinkering with webgl

With some help from Ryan and Tom, I’ve been wrapping my pea-sized brain around WebGL. I’m doing my usual start-from-the-bottom thing so it’s been a great exercise in understanding a programming paradigm built around static lists and buffers. I’ve worked like this before, but not extensively and not with a render output this smoking fast.

It’s all simple stuff so far, but I’m chasing two ideas: using WebGL for simple 2D output with an added speed bump, and driving it from SVG or the HTML DOM. None of the examples below will work unless you’re using a current WebGL-compliant browser, which for me was Chrome 17.

The elephant is me figuring out the basics of viewport transformations that match pixel positions, image textures, and simple animation passed via vertex buffers:

The monkey is a test to see how many things I can throw around on a screen without sacrificing framerate, as well as some sanity checks on coding style. Turns out, the answer is “lots”. Interesting things happen with this one when you switch to and from its tab; I’m using a basic timeout-based mechanism for the little face particles, and it clearly falls into a regular rhythm.

The unicode patterns (borrowed from Sarah Nahm) are governed by an invisible D3 force layout, and are a test of synchronization between multiple “programs” and driving a visual effect from a geometric layout. Also additive blending for punchiness. Try dragging the boxes:

These are some of the resources I’ve been using to get up to speed:

I’m still not totally comfortable with the programming approach of maintaining collections of static lists in preference to objects and other data structures, and I’ve been avoiding three.js until I can get comfortable with how WebGL works for simple, two-dimensional graphics. No lighting effects or spinny statues quite yet.

comments (3) | permanent link | tecznotes

big things

Digg
We are Digg's visualization partner, and helped launch the new Labs experimental area on their site, including Stack and Swarm! I also designed the Digg API with Shawn and Steve.

Modest Maps
Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Adobe Flash 7+, written in ActionScript. This is an active project I'm working on with Darren, Shawn, and Tom.

Mappr
Mappr is a geographic browser of Flickr's photo collection. I wrote a large portion of this application with Tomas and Eric, notably the place-name matching and geolocation bits, and pretty much the entire back-end.

Reblog
Reblog is a server-side RSS aggregator that doubles as a quick publishing mechanism for syndicated news. I wrote it with Eyebeam R+D fellow Michael Frumin.

small things

Giant-ass image viewer
Javascript pan and zoom interface for very large images, with Python code for creating required tiles. Similar in spirit to Google Maps and Zoomify. Strangely popular.

http://video.teczno.com
Distribution site for my ~~ongoing~~, occasional experiments with video production. Everything there is free.

Jitter and 3D Geometry
Updated experiments in 3D geometry handling using OpenGL and PHP.

Rooftop photos
Photos taken from the roof of the SOMA-SF warehouse space I lived in, summer of 2002.

Freeway Interchanges
Collages of freeway satellite imagery to satisfy a fetish for complex interchanges.

Visible Humans
Meat!

Quickdraw and basic 3D
Rough experiments in 3D rendering basics and matrix math.

old things

moveon: fahrenheit 9/11 national town meeting / part of a nationally-broadcast conversation between Michael Moore and MoveonPAC directors.

stamen google news visualizer / data visualisation experiment intended to give a high-level view of who's making news at the moment, and who made the news at specified times in the past.

bmw design priorities / rich internet application development in collaboration with DesignworksUSA Advanced Communications Group

moveon: bush uncovered / map of moveon.org's bush uncovered event series

naral/pro-choice america / map of the march for women's lives

sflnc / web dev political activism on behalf of the san francisco late night community

bipole / audio-video synchronicity courtesy of me & andy w.

video riot / “an edgy electronic tailgate party and a real-time drive-in multiplex”

viberation / event production, multimedia installations, dancing all night

h&k global and h&k u.s. / website, day job, web applications developer

code

Map Projection / a collection of classes used to project GPS data points onto maps, implemented in PHP 4

JSON-PHP / PHP 4 implementation of JSON, lightweight data-interchange format optimized for efficient javascript/server communication

OSC hub / PHP-based client and server for Open Sound Control, optimized for use with Max/MSP implementation.

flash component of the H&K global website, a database-driven worldwide office map