Some personal news: I’m no longer calling it the Net. Now it’s the Grid. I’m posting this on the Grid right now. Thanks!
I pledged to complete the long-delayed safety redesign of McGuinness Boulevard if elected. Last week, we got to work. A safer McGuinness Boulevard will be finished this fall.
In case you missed it, last month I released perhaps my most detailed visualization ever. It's about a strange bureaucratic ritual that plays out every 3 years in the U.S. Copyright Office: www.jerthorp.me/post/the-bur...
The Burden of Proof
Every three years, a strange bureaucratic ritual plays out in the U.S. Copyright Office. Organizations, law school clinics, trade associations, academics, companies, and individuals file mountains of ...
jerthorp.me
I realize that the formal and legal mechanisms, designed as they to arrest the malfeasance of mere gunpowder kings, are too slow and clunky for the mad dreams of a thermonuclear monarch with a globe-spanning petroleum empire, but I'd still rather see them tried than resign myself to nothing.
Huge thank you to the mom in the local schools group text who reminded us that the most apt precedent for AI in education is probably the airdropping of One Laptop Per Child OLPC XO-1’s throughout the global south
You might be able to shut down Horizon Worlds, but I'll still have my VRML.
You must understand that to manufacture consent requires a manufacturing capacity. Instead, we must retrain to learn to code consent.
🎁 With 6 weeks left in office, Eric Adams responded to a request I made nearly 3 years ago for the gifts he received as mayor. The release covers only half his term. It features an engraved belt buckle, an artillery shell, dozens of books, and, yes, a box of saltines.
children are born pedestrians yet everywhere kept in cars
This is truly a beautiful and transformative experience of a course. Worth making space in your life for it type thing.
Jer Thorp@jerthorp.bsky.social · last yr.If you want to radically re-think your relationship to data, nature & community advocacy, I have two opportunities coming up: 1. My Binoculars to Binomials course has 2 cohorts starting in September. 5 modules, 10 weeks. Cultivate an observational practice, learn creative code skills, change your 🧠
As a scholar, as a teacher, and now as a museum educator, Chronicling America has been invaluable. Beyond that, though, it's OURS. We paid for it. It's a public good.
Ryan Cordell@ryancordell.org · last yr.Some sad confirmation from @bcgl.bsky.social while I was at UW last week—the National Digital Newspaper Program—which builds Chronicling America—has been shut down Historical newspapers are probably the archival material most used by the general public—for genealogy, local history—it’s such a loss
i just finished my longest into to @beta.nyc's weekly newsletter. this one covers the NYPD's gang database & the new QoL unit that might be using 311 data 🤷🏻♀️ #opendata #civictech #pitech beta.nyc/2025/05/08/w...
What’s New in NYC Civic Tech – May 08, 2025 - BetaNYC
First, we at BetaNYC work hard to ensure that information and data are used appropriately. Second, we respect all those we work with. We truly believe that no one is above the law and that our neighbo...
beta.nyc
"The Placeholder geocoder is great but there are three things it doesn’t support by default which are pretty important for SFO Museum: ... I am happy to say that we are now able to build our own custom databases which address all of these issues." – millsfield.sfomuseum.org/blog/2025/04...
Building a custom Placeholder geocoding database
Placeholder is great but there are three things it doesn’t support by default which are pretty important for SFO Museum: The inclusion of airports, historical records and SFO Museum architectural reco...
millsfield.sfomuseum.org
You may be familiar with its previous name "The Manahatta Project"
Samantha Maldonado@smaldo.bsky.social · last yr.Endlessly fascinated by @ewsanderson.bsky.social's now-expanded Welikia Project map. Plug in your NYC address and learn about the ecological history of the place: www.welikia.org/map-explorer...
This is tomorrow! I'll be sending out the e-mail with event details this afternoon, so register soon if you want to join our 🧶📊🐦 party.
Jer Thorp@jerthorp.bsky.social · last yr.Weavers! Knitters! Felters! Quilters! Paper-makers! Random 🧶 + 🐦 people! On Thursday evening I'm hosting a meetup about the possibility space that exists between birds, data, and fiber arts! Open to everyone. Share work, or just come and chat! 🐦🧶📊 binoculars-to-binomials.disco.co/share/o/T2Nj...
The Miami Herald is doing remarkable public service journalism on deported Venezuelans and the crimes being committed against them. Almost like news institutions that are located in and around the communities they serve end up being accountable for serving those communities
or I would build out tools for organizing, like bsky.app/profile/bunk... or trestle.us
Forest Gregg@bunkum.us · last yr.today was my first official day as a data fellow for columbia labor lab, detailed to build data and tech tools for @cafastfoodunion.bsky.social to support organizing. very grateful for adam reich and sureh naidu for developing this fellowship with me, and for adam weisberg at CFFWU taking this on.
if I was a funder or a technologist trying to do good, I would not launch a shadow 18f, that's just another private contractor that will be beholden to Trump's orders, I would instead backfill the left's digital infrastructure (Act Blue, Bonterra) which is under threat now
have you ever wanted to retrieve location records intersecting and trimmed to the boundaries of a map tile in order that you might use that data to perform point-in-polygon operations locally without having to send precise coordinate data to "someone else" / now you can – github.com/whosonfirst/...
the solution is simple, we edit wikipedia to say that america is not in trade deficit to anyone, and wait for chatgpt to be updated and re-run in a few days
📄 Here's a fun one for NYC journo nerds. In response to my FOIA, the FBI has released this file on David Burnham, the muckraker behind the NYPD corruption stories of the 70s who died last year. Hoover wanted David's sources. Here's the best they had. Wish David could read it.
And overnight your friends at @nehgov.bsky.social staff have been placed on Admin Leave.
Figured it was better to be upfront about the data work that goes into our models at enigma. mdr.enigmatechnologies.dev
New from me —> Wired's un-paywalling of stories built on public data is a reminder of that data’s role in the information ecosystem www.niemanlab.org/2025/03/wire...
Wired’s un-paywalling of stories built on public data is a reminder of its role in the information ecosystem
Trump's wholesale destruction of the information-generating sectors of the federal government will have implications that go far beyond .gov domains.
niemanlab.org