MeFi Projects

This is not a work of genius, but more just the result of straight effort, and sharing not to seek praise for any kind of brilliance, but just to show it can be done and maybe nudge people toward doing the same: a local resource (Kingston, Ontario in this case) to make and share a list of non-chain restaurants that you don't have to go to Facebook to learn about. [more inside]
posted by Shepherd on Jul 29, 2024 - 0 comments

A web app that lets you search for British place names that match certain queries (eg. starts with 'great', ends with 'burgh', contains 'sea') and show them on an interactive map. Fascinating patterns start to emerge, and you can even share links to your favourite configurations.
posted by robintw on Apr 3, 2024 - 8 comments

I worked with a group of young creative / technical folks (mostly POC) to create an emotional mapping site. Tag a location and share how you're feeling — and check out the three opportunities for funded creative 'residencies'. [more inside]
posted by sixswitch on Apr 17, 2020 - 1 comment

My pals at the University of Toronto Media Commons and I mapped out all the films and TV shows set (not just filmed) in Toronto to highlight their amazing lending and archival collections.
posted by avocet on Nov 14, 2018 - 4 comments

In honour of Women's History Month, here's a map to help you explore locations in Melbourne related to women's history. Each location has some information about the site and links to more information (if available). Use the map to plan a walking tour of Melbourne or to explore the city from the comfort of your living room.
posted by mosessis on Mar 3, 2018 - 2 comments

For people who use noscript/µBlock/µMatrix or whatever to limit Google's reach on their browsing behavior, here's a userscript that replaces profile geolinks and IRL maps with OpenStreetMap. [more inside]
posted by farlukar on Feb 1, 2018 - 4 comments

A (big!) map of (nearly) every character that appears in The Silmarillion. [more inside]
posted by brappi on Jun 28, 2016 - 0 comments

Cormoran Strike's world is about 95% straight-up real. I started by looking on Google to see where Strike's office is on Denmark Street and then I got drawn in, so here's a map with locations from all three Robert Galbraith books – separated into layers – plus a layer of locations each specific to Strike and Robin. [more inside]
posted by zadcat on Feb 2, 2016 - 3 comments

I've been marking up a map of the world with locations relevant to a particular chemical element (so far just sulfur, arsenic, and iron). Each mark includes a brief description with links to additional information.
posted by bismol on Jan 27, 2016 - 6 comments

For this project, I took data from the National UFO Reporting Center and created an interactive map that lets you zoom into your area and see the UFO activity that has been reported (and sometime view photos / videos too). [more inside]
posted by mgalka on Jun 9, 2015 - 4 comments

A straightforward web interface for geocoding addresses in a CSV (or other delimited text file) and visualizing the results on a map as you go. Spits out CSV and GeoJSON. [more inside]
posted by waninggibbon on May 2, 2015 - 3 comments

An interactive map pinpointing the locations of everywhere in NYC that a movie was filmed, 2011 - 2013.
posted by mgalka on Apr 2, 2015 - 5 comments

People in New York love the subway way more than the bus. Sure, it's okay, the bus is confusing, but what if they knew all the secret places the bus could take them faster than the subway? And there was a reaaaally nice interactive map to go along with it? [more inside]
posted by soma lkzx on Jan 5, 2015 - 8 comments

My digital short story Waking Up launched today on Amazon, and to accompany the 14K-word ebook is a hellaciously difficult Minecraft map (by evil mastermind Vechs, of course) based on the world of the story. [more inside]
posted by mothershock on May 14, 2012 - 2 comments

I was playing round with Google's Fusion Tables and suddenly realised that it was both a map tile server and also a spatial query processor, all for free! Had previously struggled setting up PostGIS and Tilestache, so this was quite an eye-opener. Made a little test project, showing most of the gym locations in the UK, which shows the nearest five gyms for any other gym and also has Street View captures for a small subset of them.
posted by Donch on Feb 19, 2012 - 0 comments

The famous Tiled map editor is a powerful open source application for creating tile-based maps for use in video games, but what happens when we bring that level of versatility to anything that can run a modern browser? Add in the ability to create maps as large as you can imagine, allow editors in the same space to see each others work in real time, and this open source project could help facilitate a level of collaboration previously difficult to achieve. The end goals of this include use as a classroom teaching tool to spark young imaginations and hopefully generate interest in software development through simple games. It's a work in progress, so please feel free to let me know if there's anything you'd like to see.
posted by NBJack on Jan 18, 2012 - 0 comments

What environmental catastrophe is your neighbor? A map of all 1.6k Superfund sites and an instant finder for your own by using some interesting math hacks.
posted by tmcw on Sep 29, 2011 - 8 comments

The first of a serious of neat little side projects from my usual work on MapBox and the like - a new kind of map (I call it a 'squiggle') and a new pretty map. But, hopefully a lot more than that - I documented the process of creating the map in serious detail, and it goes over re-teaching myself high school trig, writing a scraper for Garmin Connect, trying to fake being a real artist, and figuring out some new map interactions. There's more to come, and ideally this convinces the big groups that hold onto our data to let us get at it to make more beautiful things.
posted by tmcw on Aug 1, 2011 - 4 comments

As a Saturday night project I made this map of locations where the Twelve Apostles of Jesus died. Blue markers represent commonly accepted death locations while yellow markers represent disputed locations.
posted by Catholicgauze on May 17, 2011 - 0 comments

I have been adding community bike shops to this public Google Map. [more inside]
posted by aniola on Apr 20, 2011 - 4 comments

For the past few years I've been developing techniques for computational graphic design. This is my new website, showing some of my work.
posted by jeffj on Mar 30, 2011 - 4 comments

This is a map and list of events, rallies and protests related to the opposition to Scott Walker's budget bill in Wisconsin and in support of unions all over the country. It came about because I couldn't find a single, quick source for what was going on in my area. Right now it's a manually updated Google spreadsheet that's periodically (manually) fed into a batchgeo map, but I hope to implement some of the suggestions offered in this askme. I wanted to wait to post this until it was prettier, but time is of the essence and I'd like to get it out there ASAP. [more inside]
posted by desjardins on Mar 11, 2011 - 5 comments

Finally out in the open - a project I've been working on at work. Sweet, beautiful open source map design.
posted by tmcw on Feb 16, 2011 - 2 comments

A new, visual way to browse the wonderful handmade marketplace, Etsy.com. New listings automatically become graphical representations of their states, and new maps are produced every fifteen minutes.
posted by foraneagle2 on Jan 18, 2011 - 1 comment

A little interactive map to help compare the flood affected areas of Queensland, Australia to other countries of the world.
posted by gomichild on Jan 11, 2011 - 12 comments

The TSA Choice is an activist site against the deployment of whole-body scanners and the TSA's new "enhanced patdown" procedures. We've created a map and word cloud to show what choices people are making in the security line at airports across the U.S. -- the naked pictures, or the thorough fondling by a gloved stranger? Please share your experience, too!
posted by Andrhia on Nov 19, 2010 - 8 comments

A friend and I built a simple map-based web site to help independent programmers and designers (what we call "hackers") find each other and organize meetups. We know from our own experience that this independent work can be lonely sometimes, so our hope is to help these people find nearby friends to work alongside or even collaborate with. Meetups can be organized for hanging out or just for work sessions at cafes. We are focused in particular on bringing people together from the Hacker News community (news.ycombinator.com) but I thought I'd post this here because I know there are a lot of independent, super savvy Internet folks in this community as well. Please sign up (takes 15 seconds) and add yourself to the map! (This is a barebones initial release but any and all feedback welcome.)
posted by willt on Oct 3, 2010 - 2 comments

Wikidirections is a wiki to help you get from A to B. We're a human mapping service, but with a twist. Google Maps will give you (sometimes) precise driving directions, but they won't tell you which is the cheapest, or safest, or most scenic, or quickest way between two points. Should you take the train from Vienna to Salzburg, or is the bus cheaper? That's where Wikidirections comes in. Wikidirections is geared towards world travelers, written by world travelers. We won't tell you how to get from your house to the drug store, but we will tell you, for example, how to get from Spain to Morocco quickly, cheaply, and without getting ripped off. While Wikitravel's focus is on the destination, Wikidirections focuses on the journey itself. [more inside]
posted by nitsuj on Jun 25, 2010 - 4 comments