Joseph C

Update - Jan 2026

Here are a few updates of what I’ve been working on recently, the plan is to post here occasionally to keep a record for myself but also for anyone who’s interested.

Mostly it has been the news from Venezuela that I’ve been working on - first tracking the US military build up, then the strikes and now I’m working on tracking oil extraction from the country. There’s also two longer form visual investigation pieces I’m contributing to so looking forward to having those published.

On the side I’ve been working on refactoring our map template that I set up and which uses map tiles that we host ourselves. One major improvement has been the hillshading which now uses Natural Earth rather than a separate hillshade layer. Writing the documentation out for this has been really helpful to tell me what improvements and efficiencies could be made in the template code.

Messing around with Claude Code over the last few weeks has been interesting - it helped me build this tool which I called mapcel that turns csv data into geojson and corresponding maplibre code in a zipped file to download. Love the terminal interface. I’ve also been testing out some Blender animations along with the BlenderGIS plugin. Hoping to use this in a story soon where the animation will play as you scroll down the page then streetview imagery I’ve aligned will overlay on top once you reach a certain point. This video from Forensic Architecture on camera matching was useful.

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After work I’ve been attending lectures for my MSc in Geographic Data Science. I recently finished the introductory module and coursework mostly raster analysis and analysing large geographic data sets using PostGIS. We’ve moved on now to Spatial analytics so I’ve been getting stuck into Complete Spatial Randomness, Test statistics, nearest neighbour analysis, kernel density estimation etc.

I read this research paper that I thought if I reproduced at work it could be very useful for quickly responding to certain climate or conflict events - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.05461. Could be an interesting dissertation idea to see if there could be improvements made though it already seems very effective already.

My side research project - Semblance Geospatial has been on the back burner for a while but I’ve been thinking about some ideas which I have been putting up on Are.na. This research project is a space for me to work on my own interests and research topics that utilises remote sensing, geospatial modelling techniques, design and 3D modelling but more to come on this.

A couple personal projects I’ve completed have been fixing this coffee machine I found, a very nice Sage Barista Express which just needed it’s solenoid valve replaced as the older one had rusted possibly due to limescale buildup. The other one was fixing this Sony CD player which wasn’t ejecting properly but I replaced the loading band and it worked! My next project I think will be upgrading my Thinkpad T420 laptop with a SSD and more RAM, and building a homelab to experiment with network infrastructure.

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That’s all for now but looking forward to spring/summer. Hopefully I’m going to attend the Perugia Journalism Festival in April too - will post some more updates soon.