Great Data Products
A podcast about the craft and ergonomics of data, brought to you by Radiant Earth.
Episodes
Fields of the World: Mapping Every Field on Earth
Fields of the World: Mapping Every Field on Earth | Great Data Products with Jen Marcus & Isaac CorleyJed Sundwall talks with Jen Marcus (VP of Strategic Innovation Programs) and Isaac Corley (Director of AI Research) of Taylor Geospatial about Fields of the World: an open, global map of agricultural field boundaries derived from satellite imagery with AI, released entirely in the open on Sour
Demographic Data and the Perfect Census
Jed talks with Christopher Dick, founder of Demographic Analytics Advisors and former Census Bureau population estimates researcher, about counting people at scale, the legal and technical constraints on census data, and what it looks like to build demographic data products that actually serve their users.Full show notes at https://greatdataproducts.com/episodes/2026/03/dick-demographic-data/
The Storm Events Database Explorer
Jed talks with Kwin Keuter and Brad Andrick, geospatial software engineers at Earth Genome, about the Storm Events Database Explorer. This collaborative project between Earth Genome, The Commons, and the Internet of Water Coalition provides access to over 1.9 million U.S. severe weather events spanning 70+ years of NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) storm records, includin
Turning Federal Data Into Action
Jed talks with Denice Ross, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists and former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, about federal data's role in American life and what happens when government data tools sunset. Denice led efforts to use disaggregated data to drive better outcomes for all Americans during her time as Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer, and now works on building a Federal D
How Standards Emerge: Lessons from STAC
[Jed's audio in this sounds terrible because of a hardware setting that Marshall Moutenot very kindly helped us identify. Will sound better in future episodes!]Jed talks with Matt Hanson from Element 84 about the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification and its role in making geospatial data findable and usable. Matt describes STAC as "a simple, developer-friendly way to describe geospati
Inside Harvard's data.gov Archive
Jed talks with Jack Cushman from the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab about their project to archive and preserve more than 311,000 datasets from Data.gov. We explore how they use BagIt for long-term preservation, built a serverless search interface that makes 17.9 TB of data discoverable in the browser, and what this means for the future of online archives.
Protomaps and PMTiles
Jed talks with Brandon Liu about building maps for the web with Protomaps and PMTiles. We cover why new formats won't work without a compelling application, how a single-file base map functions as a reusable data product, designing simple specs for long-term usability, and how object storage-based approaches can replace server-based stacks while staying fast and easy to integrate. Many thanks to o
Why LLM Progress is Getting Harder
Jed Sundwall and Drew Breunig explore why LLM progress is getting harder by examining the foundational data products that powered AI breakthroughs. They discuss how we've consumed the "low-hanging fruit" of internet data and graphics innovations, and what this means for the future of AI development.The conversation traces three datasets that shaped AI: MNIST (1994), the handwritten digits dataset
