10 Tools for Telling Stories With Maps

About this episode

Ryan Shields discusses 10 tools for telling stories with maps and their impact on data journalism and geospatial workflows.

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…

People in this episode

Guest: Ryan Shields

Topics covered

• geospatial tools
• data journalism
• map storytelling
• remote sensing
• AI in geospatial workflows
• historical datasets

Keywords

• map storytelling
• geospatial tools
• data journalism
• remote sensing
• AI workflows
• historical borders
• spatial data

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: FEMA, Johnny Harris's YouTube channel, New Press

Products: Felt, PostGIS, Crunchy Bridge, Geo Layers 3, CShapes, Natural Earth, MapTiler, Mapshaper, GDAL, GRASS GIS

Places: Caribbean

More episodes of The MapScaping Podcast - GIS, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, earth observation and digital geography

• Agents, Guardrails, and the Death of the Dashboard · May 14, 2026 · 51 min
• How HOT Is Rethinking Drone Mapping · April 30, 2026 · 50 min
• Common Space · March 22, 2026 · 39 min
• AI in QGIS · March 5, 2026 · 49 min
• Geospatial Makers Start Building! · February 11, 2026 · 47 min
• Vibe Coding and the Fragmentation of Open Source · February 3, 2026 · 37 min