10 Tools for Telling Stories With Maps

Ryan Shields has one of the most interesting careers in geospatial — from remote sensing for conservation in the Caribbean, to disaster response data engineering with FEMA, to his current role turning spatial data into animation assets for Johnny Harris's YouTube channel at New Press.

In this episode, Ryan counts down the 10 tools he's using right now to tell map stories that reach millions of viewers. We cover Felt, PostGIS on Crunchy Bridge, Geo Layers 3 for After Effects, CShapes for historical borders, Natural Earth, MapTiler, Mapshaper, the new GDAL pipeline syntax, GRASS GIS, and how he's stitching it all together with Claude Code and VS Code.

Along the way we get into how LLMs are changing geospatial workflows, why command-line tools are well-suited to AI agents, the limits of de facto vs de jure borders in historical datasets, and how better tooling is making data journalism viable for small communities that newsrooms usually overlook.

Whether you're a cartographer, data engineer, journalist, or just map-curious, this one is packed with links worth chasing.

 

Tools & resources mentioned in this episode

• Felt — https://felt.com
• PostGIS — https://postgis.net
• Crunchy Bridge — https://www.crunchybridge.com
• Geo Layers 3 (After Effects extension) — https://aescripts.com/geolayers/ ⚠️ verify
• CShapes (historical borders dataset) — https://icr.ethz.ch/data/cshapes/ ⚠️ verify
• Open Historical Map — https://www.openhistoricalmap.org
• Natural Earth — https://www.naturalearthdata.com
• Eduard (Swiss-style hillshading app) — https://www.eduard.earth ⚠️ verify
• Shaded Relief (Tom Patterson) — https://www.shadedrelief.com
• MapTiler — https://www.maptiler.com
• MapTiler Engine — https://www.maptiler.com/engine/
• EPSG.io — https://epsg.io
• Mapshaper — https://mapshaper.org
• GDAL — https://gdal.org
• GRASS GIS — https://grass.osgeo.org
• QGIS — https://qgis.org
• DBeaver — https://dbeaver.io
• Claude Code — https://claude.com/claude-code ⚠️ verify
• VS Code — https://code.visualstudio.com
• Geodata Viewer (VS Code extension) — search "Geodata Viewer" in the VS Code marketplace
• PAI – Personal AI Infrastructure (Daniel Miessler) — https://github.com/danielmiessler ⚠️ verify exact repo
• Deep State Map (Ukraine conflict) — https://deepstatemap.live
• Johnny Harris (YouTube) — https://www.youtube.com/@johnnyharris

Projects I'm working on

• Quick Map Tools — https://quickmaptools.com
• Hunting NZ — https://huntingnz.com
• NZ Elevation Tools — https://nzelevationtools.com
• Smart Query Tools — https://smartquerytools.com