The atlas, wherever you draw it.
Every official geography in America already has an Akashic page. Places extends the atlas to the geographies no agency tracks — the ones you know are real because you live in them. Draw the boundary; the record follows.
The Driftless Area spans four states. The I-4 corridor strings together the Florida counties between Tampa and Daytona Beach. The Black Belt crescent runs through Alabama and Georgia without asking either for permission. None of them appears in a federal gazetteer, and all of them are more real to the people who live there than the rectangles that contain them.
Places treats these geographies as first-class. A Place may hold islands and separated parts — a metro with an exclave, a cultural region with a gap — and Akashic preserves the boundary exactly as drawn. Districts are held to a stricter standard: contiguous, as the law requires.
Every saved Place becomes a page in the same atlas — the same composition, the same sourced figures, the same share card — as the counties, the districts, and the metros the government does track.
A freehand boundary, counties or precincts assembled one by one, or a district draft generated from a description. Islands and separated parts are welcome — real places have both.
The presidential history from 1892 to 2024, the people who live there, and every county the boundary touches — computed server-side and labeled by resolution, never guessed.
Saving creates a plate of its own: a stable URL, a share card, open JSON, and a place in your library. Fork any public Place and reshape it into yours.
A drawn boundary earns its figures the hard way. Presidential history is rolled up from the counties the boundary intersects, weighted by the county lines in force in each election year. Population and race come block-measured where blocks exist; profile values bridged from the American Community Survey stay labeled as estimates. Akashic never manufactures a median for a region no survey ever measured — an honest gap outranks a confident guess.
America does not stop at the county line — and the record should not either.
The studio is free with an account. Your first Place takes about a minute; the record it earns runs back to 1892.