This post was largely drafted in May 2020 but the practice and point still remains. I’m making more of an effort to share my past work. I have quite a few posts that I’ve left in draft for whatever reason.

James Fee’s tweet (now since deleted in 2025 when I’m publishing this) along with Mapbox’s recent announcement of deprecating loading maps made in Mapbox Studio classic, reminded me that the ‘life span’ of online web maps are relatively short, sometimes 2-3 years. How do you view or remember them when software breaks, the hosting bill is no longer paid, your employer decides to just cancel the project, or the company hosting it goes out of business?

I didn’t to lose the work that I’ve done over the years; I wanted to be able to save and view them later so here’s what I’ve been doing.

1. Decide and prioritize what you want to save Obvious needs to be said, but you can’t save everything. One of my largest misconceptions of public libraries before I started working at one is that they archive and save so much everything: they save and preserve a lot less than you think. Libraries decided what ou. (particularly if it Deciding what to save and document is part of their process. With online maps, you won’t be able to save every view, every map interaction , every zoom level.

1a. For online maps that may be large and you can’t capture the entire area: what geographic areas hold personal sentimental value to you? were unique or noteworthy? Any geographic areas on the map or map interactions that really showed off your work and effort ?

1. For Raster Maps (before vector tiles were widely used), the-ultimate-tile-stitcher, a python script made by Stamen, that enables you to download each of the png raster tiles and then stitches them together as one very large png image.

the-ultimate-tile-stitcher worked excellent to fetch several maps I made in Mapbox Studio Classic. These maps didn’t have any interaction, markers, pop-ups, on them; these were base maps; the-ultimate-tile-stitcher works best on base maps. the-ultimate-tile-stitcher only works on raster tiles (X/Y/PNG) which is what mapbox was getting rid of in 2020 (2025 edit: that long ago ?!).

1. If your map is a vector map (or is web-gl like Mapzen’s Tangram maps): Make a screen recording while viewing the map and map interactions; zooming in and out at multiple zoom levels, and whatever you want to capture. Making the screen recording while you view your map works across any mapping library and software that you use.

2. don’t forget to add a couple sentences about the project; include the project docs and your build setup. you may forget a few years from now ;)

Long time no talk. (Note: this post will be further edited for grammar and clarity)

Currently, Cleveland has 17 members of Cleveland City Council, councilmen, that each represent a designated geographic area known as a ward.

Because of City Rules and city’s declining population, the ward boundaries are being redrawn in a relatively opaque process.

Before the proposed boundaries are released, I wanted to try drawing my own, so here is how I did that, and what I learned in the process.

Why redraw the boundaries?

The City Charter requires the number of councilmen to depend on the city’s population taken during the Census every 10 years.

The guidelines are specified in Chapter 5 of the City’s Charter sections 25 and 25.1, both of which state:

“The wards so formed shall be as nearly equal in population as may be fair and equitable, composed of contiguous and compact territory, and bounded by natural boundaries or street lines” Section 25.1, which deals specifically with the reapportionment, redrawing of the ward boundaries, omits be fair and equitable portion.

A May 2024 Press Release from Cleveland City Council mentions census tracks (sic) , reviews and compiling and analyzing GIS data” but there are no other public mention of criteria that are used. The city did hold public meetings in October.

They are being redrawn for the 2025 election. The 2020 Census results on a city-wide level were released in August 2021, only three months before the last city election; which was not enough time to make new ward boundaries for that election. That said, I wonder why the city waited until 2024 to redraw the ward boundaries.

My goals for making my own proposed boundaries:

• I found the existing ward boundaries last made in 2013 to not be very compact nor bounded by natural boundaries.

• I wondered how difficult it could be to make a new boundaries that had be more cohesive to align with neighborhood boundaries.

• Learn more about the process.

How I did it:

Dave’s Redistricting is free software to create redistricting maps in the USA and was extremely useful for my drawing of the new ward boundaries. As you create a map with in Dave Redisricting, the population for each political subdivison is automatically calculates the population.

(insert the screenshot displaying the interface, where you quickly view the population of each current section; draw an area by particular census tracks or census blocks.

With that in mind, I hadn’t looked at the existing boundaries before drawing new boundaries and I started from a blank canvas; I did not modify the existing ward boundaries.

I don’t know if there’s any rule prohibiting their use to draw the ward boundaries but I used census blocks to give more me flexibility. Then I drew.

For boundaries: where possible, I used freeways (just south of the Opportunity Corridor I-71, the innerbelt, i-90), natural features like Doan Brook, the gap between east 67th and Marion Motley Park which formally was Kingsbury Run and the Sidaway Bridge , the lowlying area (where the zoo and Big Creek are located) and changes in landuse, railways. I didn’t realize until finishing it that my proposed boundaries for Slife and Kazy were extremely similar to their existing wards; population in that area changed very little between 2010 and 2020.

What I learned from this:

The councilpeople whose wards will be eliminted will likely fall onto councilpeople whose wards are towards the center of the city. This is because ward boundaries ; so you have more flexibility in the center

More importantly, the populations of each ward are extremely similar: I made a couple drafts of the map and compared it to the 2013 ward boundaries. I noticed the each ward’s population in the 2013/2014 ward boundaries were extremely close to each other. Each ward’s population in the 2013 map ranged from 22,240 (Ward 4) to 24,509 (ward 13); all wards’ populations were within 5% of 23,342 which is the average of (2010 Census for the city of Clevelandwas 396,815; divided by 17 (wards). (Ward population data is from NeoCando at CWRU)

Thus, I need to go back to the drawing board.

Now knowing that Cleveland City Council would likely only pass (into law) a set of ward boundaries whose ward populations were within 5% of the average population of a ward, I made another version of the map, what you see here. The city of Cleveland’s population according to the 2020 Census was 372,624. Divide that by 15 wards, averages to 24,841 and if we want all wards to be within 5% of that average, each ward’s population must fall between roughly 23,600 and 26,000.

As noted by Nick Castele in this Signal Cleveland piece, the majority of the city’s population loss between the 2010 and 2020 Census was on the East side, ( The City Planning Department has several maps highlighting the population change in Statistical Planning Areas (SPA) like 6,000 less people in the Glenville SPA). Because each ward’s population needs to be very similar (in this case between 23,600 and 26,000) you’ll need to cover more land compared to the previous ward boundaries to reach the desired ward’s population, consequently leading to larger boundaries and on the East side and create the perception on the East Side that will lose representation.

View my proposed Ward Boundaries for 2024 on a map

(This has been sitting in my drafts folder for months; I need to just post!)

As a teenager in the early/mid 2000s, I cut out my favorite articles from print publications (Plain Dealer - the daily newspaper in Cleveland, or the Free Times, the Scene (the local alt. weeklies), or the New York Times - I had a subscription when I was home from college); I would then glue them onto poster board and then hang them up on my bedroom wall using sticky tack or push pins.

I don’t know where I got the idea for this; I don’t claim to be the original.

While cleaning, I found some of these and decided to document them before I threw them out.

(As a part of my effort to document my life on my blog instead of just on twitter, I’ve posted this here.)