Statlas: beta release

It’s been some time in the making but today we are proud to do a very early beta release of Statlas, the project we have been working on these past months. The Dutch Press Innovation fund funded this project and we collaborated with Fluxility and Alexander Zeh on this version. So please do check out: Statlas

There are several similar tools out there that help you create your own map but we feel that they are not as easy as they should be and most all of them are created in Flash. Statlas is built on Polymaps and therefore fully compatible with the open web. Creating a map is a simple as painting by numbers.

Our initial explorations set us on our way to create the easiest and most generative atlas tool we could imagine. Statlas is setup to allow you to choose a group of regions and for each of those regions enter a value (numerical, color or other) to create a map coloring. That map can then be shared, printed, embeded wherever you want . But anybody can also take a public map and edit it to improve upon existing data or to express their differences with them. It is also possible to export data to CSV, use other tools to collect statistics and re-import them back into Statlas.

Feedback

This initial release is geared towards the Dutch context as we have been developing it with the Netherlands in mind first. We are going to quickly add more regions and we are solliciting requests for regions you may want to add. If you have ideas, requests and or Shapefiles, please send them our way so we may add them.

This is a most preliminary beta release of a functional piece of software. We are envisioning much more data heavy and live updating views in the near future, but a project of this scope can balloon too easily. We’ve heard no end of people who wanted to use it for one cause or another and we wanted to show something first. After this release we’ll see which direction is most in demand of pursuing.