About Empathy Atlas
Empathy Atlas turns datasets and maps into empathy. This is what it is, the funded work at its heart, how each experience fits, and the explorer behind it.
The concept
Every point is a person. Every layer, a lived reality.
Empathy Atlas isn’t a single map — it’s the whole: a growing family of mapping experiences, each of which is (or contains) an atlas of its own, all feeding one shared understanding. Where a conventional map shows you what and where, the Empathy Atlas holds the who and the why— the story behind each number, told by the person who lived it.
Words on a map, colored by the emotion they carry and sized by how often they were shared. In XR and VR they surround you — whispers at a distance, clear as you approach.
We hold the human context behind the data, so understanding can become empathy.
Stories sit against the geographies and datasets they belong to: freedoms, work, movement, time.
Explore in map, XR, and VR. Choosing a feeling lets the stories connected to it flow out.
The funded project
At the heart of the atlas is a funded body of work bringing Black migration histories to life, beginning with the Underground Railroad. People are interviewed in placeat historic sites, reflecting on the ground where freedom was sought. Their voices, and the emotions inside them, become the atlas’s first layer.
Supported by the National Geographic Society.
The experiences
Where Freedom Walked and Liberation Lines are the two outputs of the funded project, different doors into the same atlas. Each one gives back to the shared concept and the models the project produces.
Reflections recorded in place at historic Underground Railroad sites. The interviews and emotions gathered here are the first stories in the atlas, and the raw material for everything it builds next.
Explore Where Freedom WalkedPeople map their family across three generations, where they lived, the work they did, the decades they were born, and watch their line join a whole community lit across the map. It carries the concept to living families, using the same emotion system and data models the funded work produced.
Explore Liberation Lines
The person
National Geographic Explorer · antiracist geostoryteller
Clinton is the creator of Empathy Atlas and the founder of NorthStar of GIS, a nonprofit advancing racial justice and Black representation across geography and GIS. He believes a map can be a form of listening, and has spent his career making geography a tool for equity rather than exclusion.
Today he is CEO & Chief Visionary Officer of Us At Spaces. He began in Philadelphia as the city’s first Chief Enterprise Architect and served as the NAACP’s first Senior Vice President of GeoEquity Innovation. Empathy Atlas is where his data work and his storytelling meet.
