Real maps, real data, real people who needed someone to notice. New ones posted here roughly every week.
This started as a portfolio for GIS Analyst job applications. That's changed. It's now a running record of real mapping projects, posted here as I finish them, roughly every week or two.
Every project uses real data and answers a real question, whether that's where mental health care is hardest to reach in Illinois, how a flood response actually unfolded in Nepal, or how the borders of North America shifted over five centuries. Civic projects tend to be about people who get overlooked. Personal ones are just things I find genuinely interesting.
New posts show up here first, with the full archive on the Blog page.
I trained a model to find every surface parking lot in the six-county Chicago region from 2023 aerial photos. At least 57 square miles is parking, OpenStreetMap is missing over half of it, and a quarter sits where the new state law bans parking minimums.
Read the story
I tracked every Pace bus for a month and checked it against Pace's own schedule. Between 1 in 94 and 1 in 53 trips never appeared, most of them in the south suburbs. At my own stop, a quarter to a third of rush-hour buses never left.
Read the story
Every flat map of the world distorts something. Twenty map projections, drawn and measured in Python, from ancient star charts to the equal-area map the UN voted for in September 2026, with the story of who made each one and what problem they were trying to solve.
Read the story
Across sixteen US transit systems, 5.8% of scheduled bus trips left no trace in the agency's own realtime feed. San Antonio missed 0.4%; Chicago and Baltimore missed roughly one trip in seven. Four validity tests stand between the raw feeds and those numbers, and each one exists because it caught a confident, wrong answer first.
Read the analysis
More than 700 people died in a Chicago heat wave, and the neighbourhoods where they died are not the hottest places in the city. Episode three joins satellite thermal imagery with 1995 business records and today's map of places to gather, and finds that neither map on its own predicts where the deaths clustered.
Listen to episode three
Is that blank space on the map empty because nothing is there, or because nobody looked? A map draws those two exactly the same. Episode two teaches four lessons in reading maps, tested against 14,510 humanitarian mapping projects and every UN humanitarian appeal since 2014.
Listen to episode two