Stamen founder Eric Rodenbeck, 38, was working as an art director for a company that produced sports websites during what he calls "Delusion 1.0" - otherwise known as the '90s dot-com boom - when he first began to appreciate the narrative potential of complex data sets. To connect fans with an around-the-world yacht race, he equipped the boats with GPS transceivers, email, and cameras, and fed the data into online visualizations that told the story of the competition. When the project ended, he was hungry for more. "The impulse to tell stories with data dovetailed with all the data that was suddenly flowing onto the internet," he says. "It seemed like I could do it for everything."
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