This is episode 1 of 4 with Stephanie May (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mizmay/). She is a veteran of the web mapping industry. She was Senior, Technical Cartographer at Apple. Next she was Lead Cartographer at Facebook creating their first global basemap. Her most recent position was Director of Geospatial at Stamen. As such we are faced with an excellent follow on guest from Linda Stevens (https://youtu.be/55urfsPH_ws?si=tDa9bQOluLwApKYj). This is because Linda described how Esri came to dominate the market through educating a global army of technicians accustomed to their software. One may describe them as having the career of 'Esri Technician' with various levels of seniority. This raises the question of what a career could look like if one did not become an Esri Technician. Stephanie May is the perfect person to illustrate that for us.
Early on in our discussion we covered her viral kriging analysis of housing affordability in San Francisco. Here are some write ups from the time:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/most-expensive-neighborhoods-san-francisco_n_2967522
https://burritojustice.com/2013/03/20/rent-from-on-high/
https://goldengatexpress.org/43942/latest/news/interactive-heat-map/
https://stamen.com/stephanie-may-interdisciplinary-cartography/
She also recreated a web version of the map just for this episode in the past week:
https://mizmay.github.io/RentAffordability/RentAffordability_2013_EBK.html
Further on in the discussion we started to talk about the technology behind web maps. She recommended understanding these concepts to make good ones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_Buffers
https://docs.mapbox.com/help/glossary/mbtiles/
https://docs.protomaps.com/pmtiles/
The discussion turned to navigation (pardon the pun) toward the end when talking about her time at Apple Maps. Here is my journal publication on wayfinding that I mentioned:
https://josis.org/index.php/josis/article/view/21
Also during our coverage of navigation aids Stephanie mentioned an NYT op-ed about flaws in Google Maps:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/opinion/google-maps-driving-apps-flaws.html
Interestingly, I came across discussion from them also about the need for landmarks in route directions:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/science/giving-directions-start-with-a-landmark.html.
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