GIS that makes the overlooked undeniable.
Real maps, real data, real people who needed someone to notice. New ones posted here roughly every week.
Every project I build, in the order I built it. Some weeks that's a full interactive map, some weeks it's a shorter write-up about a technique or a dead end I ran into. Real data, real sources, real limitations, every time.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Joining 14,510 volunteer mapping projects against every UN humanitarian appeal since 2014 shows that volunteer mapping tracks the size of an emergency only up to a point. Among the 36 largest crises, the relationship disappears.
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Launching Dulcet GIS, a podcast about maps and who gets to draw them. Episode one covers the UN General Assembly vote to adopt the Equal Earth projection, the executive orders that renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario, and why OpenStreetMap was the only map that did not change.
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Thirty years after the 1995 Chicago heat wave, satellite thermal imagery and 1995 business records show the neighborhoods that suffered most were not the hottest by day, but the ones that stayed hot at night and had lost their gathering places.
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Replicating a 2025 PLOS One geographically weighted regression study on real, more recent Chicago crime data, to show where the real predictors of crime strengthen, weaken, or reverse across the city.
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A full rebuild of an early AI-assisted project running on fake mock data, replaced with real Pew Research figures, real OpenStreetMap Heathen sites, and Iceland's real government-tracked Ásatrú growth.
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Replicating a April 2026 PLOS ONE street-network study on Chicago for the first time, to find which neighborhoods have real services nearby AND a connected street grid, and which have only one or neither.
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Ten of the most endangered species in the U.S., each mapped with its own real, best-available metric, not one uniform number forced onto all of them.
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A single executive order renamed a Great Lake for U.S. Google Maps users. A real toggle map showing what changed, and why OpenStreetMap doesn't work that way.
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The real HOT/NAXA volunteer mapping response to the August 2026 Rasuwa flood in Nepal, alongside cloud-masked before/after satellite imagery and the real, still-rising toll.
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A national map of real, state-by-state case counts for every CDC-notifiable disease, tracked against the actual dated timeline of federal vaccine policy changes since RFK Jr. took over HHS.
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A timelapse map of who actually controlled North American territory, 1492 to today: Indigenous nations, colonial powers, and the United States.
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Testing a 2026 Demography paper's finding about shared activity space and segregation, at the Chicagoland municipality level.
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Every cafe, library, community center, and social facility across 319 Chicagoland municipalities, mapped per capita so towns of any size can be compared fairly.
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County-level suicide rates, mental distress, and uninsured rates swiped directly against mental health facility locations across all 102 Illinois counties.
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Where 16 prized wood-turning species actually grow across Illinois, based on real USDA Forest Service survey data. Built for my uncle, a wood turner in the Chicago area.
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An interactive map of 285+ Chicago-area food pantries cross-referenced against real CTA, Metra, and Pace transit lines.
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A live, auto-updating dashboard tracking Canadian wildfire smoke and its impact on Chicago-area air quality.
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A 2023 GIS capstone proving real food insecurity in one of the wealthiest counties in the country, now being rebuilt open-source at a 90-mile Chicago radius.
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A live dashboard analyzing healthcare accessibility across Illinois, streaming cloud-native geospatial data in real time.
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A dashboard mapping every U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility and its reported population.
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Live precipitation and humidity across Illinois weather stations.
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A StoryMap built from 31 in-person community interviews, mapping mental health resources across DuPage County.
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A dashboard rating CTA stations by heat vulnerability in walkable zones, layering climate and demographic data.
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Analyzes canopy cover and trail elevation across DuPage County Forest Preserves to find the shadiest walking routes.
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A temporal heat map of roughly 500 vampire and horror film locations across the U.S., 1960-2026.
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Tracks player and team fatigue across the 2026 World Cup, combining travel distance with days of rest between matches.
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