The Atlantic Cities has a nice portrait of Eric Fischer: Mapmaker, artist, or programmer?. If you have been following information visualization and geovisualization news online over the recent years, I bet you have come across Fischer’s work. A few examples:
“Ultimately, almost everything I have been making tries to take the dim, distant glimpse of the real world that we can see through data and magnify some aspect of it in an attempt to understand something about the structure of cities.”
“When the maps succeed, I think it is when they can confirm something that the viewer already knows about their neighborhood or their city, and then broaden that knowledge a little by showing how some other places that the viewer doesn’t know so well are similar or different.”
– Eric Fischer
What I like most about Fischer’s projects is that they are often crowdsourced (from Flickr or Twitter), data-heavy and employ often, not always, quite simple analysis or visualization approaches, but to great effect. In the end it’s all about the ideas behind the visualizations and Fischer doesn’t seem to be short on those.
Eric Fischer, formerly programmer at Google, is currently artist-in-residence at a San Francisco museum, where he will hopefully continue to produce interesting maps and visualizations. It’s probably indeed safe to respond to the Atlantic Cities article’s title that Fischer is all: mapmaker and artist and programmer.