NACIS 2024

Are you attending NACIS for the first time and feeling a little overwhelmed? Join your New Attendee Ambassadors (Joanna Merson, Sarah Bell, David Nuttall, and Daniel Wood), Atlas of Design editor Nat Case, and Program Co-chairs Hannah Dormido and Vicky Johnson-Dahl for a special introductory session designed specifically for you. Whether you're looking to make the most of the sessions, connect with fellow cartography enthusiasts, or navigate the event easily, meet us in the Map Gallery for a warm welcome and some pro tips to start your conference off right!

Make your cartographic fashion statement with swag from the NACIS Shop! All proceeds go to supporting popular NACIS initiatives including student travel grants, contest awards, and video streaming. Feeling inspired? Submit your design at nacis.org/initiatives/nacis-apparel/submit-t-shirt-artwork/ to make a map-tastic impact!

Items for sale:

2024 conference t-shirt ($25)
Enamel Map Monster pin ($6)
Map Monster Sticker ($3)
Nacis Luggage Tag ($4)

Credit card payments only at this time.

Using Interactive Maps to Enhance Healthcare Equity
Zachary Sherman,Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Our study utilizes a two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method to investigate disparities in healthcare accessibility from block groups within Virginia, focusing on both driving and transit modalities across various regions including Altavista, Greenville, Lynchburg, Richmond, Staunton, Williamsburg, and Winchester. By integrating demographic prevalence data from the CDC, we quantitatively assess accessibility scores for different social groups and locations. Our methodology employs advanced geospatial analysis techniques, leveraging Google API for precise travel time estimation. A key objective is identifying the social groups and block groups that exhibit the most significant disparities between car and transit accessibility scores. Preliminary findings indicate marked differences in service accessibility, highlighting areas and populations with critical needs. By pinpointing the block groups with the largest disparities in accessibility, our study not only sheds light on the spatial and social dimensions of healthcare equity but also informs targeted policy interventions aimed at bridging the gap between everyday citizens identifying nearby healthcare services. Leveraging ArcGIS Dashboards and ChatGPT, our team, and collaboration with the American Dental Association, we transform our accessibility data into actionable insights for policymakers and the general population. Our innovative AI integration methods allow policymakers and everyday people to perform spatial queries with an easy conversation-like interface. Using ChatGPT API, we train and leverage our accessibility data to prompt responses for both numeric responses and spatial queries, a limitation in the current status of geographic AI research.

Algorithmic Design Defaults: Implications and Possibilities
Jim Thatcher, Oregon State University; Meghan Kelly, Syracuse University & Craig Dalton, Hofstra University
This talk examines what we call taken-for-grantedness in some technologically-inflected design choices. Beginning from the ideas that maps are a means of telling stories and making claims about the world, this talk provides examples of how oft-unconsidered and routinely deployed algorithms are potential and realized sites of routinized design and algorithmic harm in how they present the world and in who they include and exclude from consideration. We focus on three cases in different registers of map making: projections, generalization, and classification. Each involves common algorithms deployed in cartographic workflows in classroom, government, agency, and research settings.

For Mapping in Folds: Space is Not a Grid
Alexis Wood, University of California, Berkeley
This presentation asks if the limitations of contemporary mapping can be traced to our tools or to limitations in our cartographic theory. Using an approach informed by the Deluzian fold and the Benjaminian constellation, I question cartographic scale and conceptions of spacetime through various material investigations.

The Pasifika Film Database: Mapping Islands, Oceans and Identities Beyond Imperialism and Militarisation
Clancy Wilmott, Sophia Perez & Elizabeth Fiske, University of California, Berkeley
In 2023-24, a team of researchers from the Critical Pacific Island Studies Collective at UC Berkeley assembled a database of films and documentaries set in the Pacific or directed by Pasifika filmmakers. This presentation discusses the myriad difficulties of translating this database into a web-map using pre-established mapping solutions in the context of the ongoing cartographic construction of the Pacific Ocean as a strategic region for militarization, territorialization, and annexation. To foreground self-determination, sovereignty, and epistemic justice, we argue that new cartographies are desperately needed, including island-centered feature sets, anti-imperialist systems of scale, and new visual conventions.

Mapping Reese Street: Black Cartographies and Community Mapping in Athens, Georgia
Jerry Shannon, Amber Orozco & Amy Andrews, University of Georgia
Our paper describes an ongoing community partnership to map the Reese Street neighborhood in Athens, Georgia. This historically Black neighborhood is recognized as both a national and local historic district, but few Black residents remain due to gentrification pressures. Our research works from the 1958 Athens city directory, archival records, and oral histories to map this community at the end of the Jim Crow era. Our partnership includes community members, academic geographers from the University of Georgia, and staff at a local historic preservation organization. This collaboration ensures that the results of this work can be used to advocate for policies that protect its remaining residents from displacement.

Acceptable Interpretations
Mark Denil
The painter John Constable’s observation that “we see nothing truly till we understand it” and CS Lewis’ character Ransom’s that “you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are” both point to the well-established fact that interpretations create the very facts that prove them.
Once we have accepted an artifact as a map, we have already situated it against a horizon of other maps—maps that, by definition, have interpretations. It is our juxtaposition of this new map with the map horizon that points us to an acceptable interpretation—‘acceptable’ being a key term that will vary for every individual and individual map.
What constitutes an acceptable interpretation? How do we know one when we encounter it? How do we read a map?

Make Your Mark - Results and Pitfalls of Starting a Cartography Contest 
Matthew Hampton, Oregon Metro
The results of an ad hoc cartography contest designed to create a sense of belonging and honor deceased cartographer friends will be presented, along with some pitfalls, tips, and tricks to help create a stronger sense of belonging in the mapping industry.

Rebuilding Natural Earth: An Updated Public Preview of Version 6
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Kelso Cartography & Tom Patterson, U.S. National Park Service (retired)
In 2021, we announced plans to rebuild Natural Earth, a popular source for open map data. Just as musicians remix their best albums, we’ve redrawn geometries to have more precision and alignment with modern terrain models, and are introducing a more detailed feature compilation to bridge the zoom gap in global base maps when pairing with OpenStreetMap. 30 months later, with countless hours from many volunteers, we are closing in on public release of Natural Earth version 6. Hydrography has gained GIS attributes, admin areas have polygons, populated places coverage has almost doubled, with all the roads added to get you between them. Raster themes have all been updated with the new hydro and relief, and a new classified landcover theme added.

Telling the Story of Changing Populations With Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas
Kelsey Taylor & Eric Brelsford, Stamen Design
Earlier this year, Stamen Design re-partnered with the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia to further iterate on Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas. MHNY shows how migration, residential, and occupational patterns shaped New York City during the 19th and 20th centuries. As the densest area in the United States, displaying complex individual- and dwelling-level data across New York City presented many design and technical challenges. Hear how we’ve updated the Digital Atlas to include vector dot density maps, proportional circles, and choropleths across many different slices of historical census data.

What’s New in Eduard?
Bernie Jenny, Dilpreet Singh, Bridget Walker, Matthew Siegenthaler, Owen Davies, Griffin Collins, and John Phan (Monash University, Melbourne), and Tom Patterson (U.S. National Park Service, retired)
Eduard is an app for creating shaded relief with machine learning at https://eduard.earth. In our presentation, we will showcase tools added since Eduard’s introduction at NACIS 2022, including improved relief shading, ambient occlusion shading, texture shading, and layers with blend modes, curves, masks, blur, and sharpening filters. We will also preview future extensions of Eduard, including ongoing work on the generalization of small-scale contour lines with machine learning. Finally, we will show shaded relief artwork created by users of Eduard.

Visualizing Multidimensional Climate Data on the Web with Zarr and @carbonplan/maps
Kata Martin & Shane Loeffler, CarbonPlan
Climate data (and many other scientific datasets) are often massive, multidimensional, and challenging to get into desktop GIS and cartography tools, let alone a web map. @carbonplan/maps is an open-source tool for efficiently visualizing this complex data on the web by leveraging the emerging Zarr format and WebGL. Here we showcase its use in a recent project exploring a new dataset simulating the efficiency of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), a carbon removal technique. The OAE Efficiency Map allows exploration of nearly 700 global ocean simulations, allowing scientists and system actors to get a better sense of where and when the most effective carbon removal is possible.

Felt in Action
Mamata Akella, Felt
Felt is a powerful tool for data exploration, spatial analysis, cartography, and collaboration. It enables more people in your organization to work with maps and collaborate in real time through its modern, easy-to-use interface packed with powerful features. Join this talk to learn how to work with a variety of data formats, advanced filtering and search capabilities, robust spatial analysis tools, and intuitive cartographic controls that together, simplify the data exploration and mapmaking process and are uniquely Felt. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced professional, see how Felt improves workflows, enhances team communication, and enables informed decision-making through practical examples and a live demo.

Integrating Use-Specific Styles into a Generalized Map Hierarchy
Lauren James, Apple
Apple’s Maps app is constantly evolving as we create new offerings for our users. Our latest undertaking necessitated integrating new data into an existing hierarchical structure, with emphasis on a considered and balanced redesign of layers. This challenging puzzle included needed technical advancements across several codebases and a cross-functional effort. Maps’ Cartography team will present the design and data decisions behind this undertaking.

A New Tool For Interactive Flow Mapping
Paulo Raposo, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Drawing cartographically-refined origin-destination (OD) flow maps in automated or semi-automated digital contexts remains difficult. This research presents a new, interactive and semi-automated tool for OD flow map creation. Realized in a free and open-source application that runs using Python scripts and web technologies, this tool allows users to adjust the shape of OD flow arrows either universally or on a per-flow basis. A preview of the output flows is rendered live to the user as they make flow path adjustments. Output in georeferenced vector formats is exportable from the app for use in other settings, such as geographic information systems (GIS), web maps, or graphic design software.

Join together with other attendees to set up an ad hoc informal gathering on a topic that interests you. Maybe you want to discuss your favorite map projections with fellow enthusiasts, or maybe you're a student who wants to create a space to network with other students and share advice. Reserve the NACIS Commons and add whatever you think our conference is missing. A sign-up sheet will be available on-site and reservations are first come, first served.

The Commons area will have with a handful of chairs for group gatherings. When the room is not in use, the Commons also serves as a quieter space to sit and chat away from the more crowded areas.

Slack channel: #nacis2023-grandstation2

Roots and Migrants
Chiamaka Nwajiaku & Professor Caglar Koylu, University of Iowa
I will present a web-based story map application, Roots & Migrants, aimed at increasing public scientific literacy and engagement with migration, kinship networks, and U.S. history.It is a part of an NSF project's broader impact activities, visualizing migration and family tree data alongside events, populations, and movements of underrepresented groups like Native Americans, African Americans, and Mexicans. Data will be extracted from historical sources; this accessible online tool helps the public and those with limited GIS background understand migration's challenges to First Nations. Roots & Migrants will be integrated into high school social studies curricula through collaborative workshops with teachers.

Comparative Evaluation of Univariate and Bivariate Choropleth Maps: Perceptual and Cognitive Insights from an Eye-Tracking Study
Michalis Kantartjis, University of Iowa
Our study evaluates univariate and bivariate choropleth maps using eye-tracking technology to uncover key perceptual and cognitive differences among tasks such as identifying patterns and comparing regions. Data analysis from 75 participants showed that bivariate maps, while initially challenging, enable more efficient, and in some tasks, accurate interpretation of complex spatial patterns. Self-reported measures indicated improved performance and reduced mental demand with bivariate maps. Additionally, our introduction of an interactive legend led users to explore the map interface more thoroughly. Gaze heatmaps and scan path analyses revealed distinct visual patterns, suggesting that bivariate maps, contrary to previous research, can enhance map reading efficiency.

Who’s On First: Ready for Map Display
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Kelso Cartography
The Who’s On First (WOF) gazetteer is a big list of places, each with a stable identifier, and a set of common and optional descriptive properties about that location. Since launching in 2015, the project has gained global coverage by aggregating open data sources, including from hundreds of authoritative government census and statistical organizations. The WOF gazetteer’s focus on populated places (including localities, townships, and neighborhoods), name localization, and internationalization has proven useful for search and reverse geocoding applications. However, until recently, it was hard to draw data on a map. Recent work has made it easier to load the data into common GIS tools via a shapefile distribution, to attribute polygons with “official” concordance IDs useful for choropleth mapping, and to filter features based on population and feature class into zoom buckets to display and label town spots on a slippy map.

Spatial Analysis of Fire-Armed Related Crime in Atlanta
Olalekan Alamoh, Georgia State University
The objective of my research is to employ Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map and analyze areas in Atlanta with a high incidence of firearm-related crimes. My aim is to improve public safety and increase the overall quality of urban life. I observed a notable concentration of firearm occurrences in distinct urban regions, as indicated by a high Moran's I value. This suggests that these crimes are not randomly spread around but occur in clusters. The results of my research stretched the possibility of implementing focused interventions in these areas of high criminal activity. This can lead to the development of more efficient crime prevention tactics and the creation of safer communities in Atlanta. This research is crucial for law enforcement and legislators who are looking for evidence-based solutions to urban crime.

Ride, Sink, or Swim: Mapping Extreme Floods and the Burdens of Buses in Queens, NYC
Nicholas Dante Lucchetto, Hofstra University
New York City experiences many extreme flooding events. One of the worst was September 2023, when 9.8 inches of rain fell in a single day. For the low-elevation borough of Queens, where 52% of people rely on public transit, the burdens of flooding are worsened by sparse subways and stranded cars. Therefore, buses are a critical mobility and safety tool during a weather emergency in Queens. This study looks at how flooding affects New York City bus performance and infrastructure, by incorporating metrics like bus delay data, precipitation records, and 311 reports. This study helps uncover how—and where—a multi-faceted climate event affects the daily life of Queens residents and how NYC buses keep on rolling amid our climate crisis.

Enhancing Visual Realism in Web-Based 3D Terrain Maps
Ondřej Procházka, Seznam.cz
Web-based 3D terrain maps employ technologies like HTTP/2 and WebGL to generate dynamic perspective views from underlying DEMs and landcover data in real-time, offering an interactive experience within your browser. In this talk, I will discuss some of my recent efforts to upgrade a global web-based 3D terrain map, focusing on achieving enhanced visual realism, improved terrain representation, and better rendering performance.

Animating Maps with Adobe After Effects
Sarah Bell, Esri
Animated map graphics have become a ubiquitous part of media production. Documentaries, advertisements, and even fictional television shows have been using Adobe After Effects to create map animations to visually aid their stories. From flight routes, to tsunami waves, to rotating globes, the possibilities are endless. In this talk, I will share tips that I've learned by turning my static map graphics into animations with Adobe After Effects.

Mapping Light and Shadow on Mount Everest
Carl Churchill, The Wall Street Journal
Mount Everest has developed a mountaineering industry built around summiting the highest peak on earth. This industry has had to adapt to changing climactic conditions on the route, as the glacier that hikers on the southern, or Nepali, route, rely on has been gradually collapsing. As part of a year-long graphics project for The Wall Street Journal, I constructed a 3D model of Everest with open-source tools and combined detailed reporting with simulated physical conditions to portray to our readers how Everest expeditions must race against a melting glacier to reach the top.

Visualizing Change: How Map Design Shapes Our Views on Glacier Retreat 
Fangsheng (Jasper) Zhou, University of Oregon
This presentation explores the emotional and perceptual impacts of 2D versus 3D map designs on viewers' understanding of glacier retreat due to climate change. Utilizing the South Cascade Glacier as a case study, this research examines how different visual representations can influence public perceptions and emotional responses to environmental changes. Through a user study involving a diverse group of participants, the study aims to highlight the effectiveness of map design in communicating complex geographic information and raising awareness about the pressing issue of climate change.

Canyon Cartography
Brandon Plewe, Brigham Young University
Over the years, a great deal of research has been done and dozens of techniques have been developed for portraying the beautiful and rugged landscape of mountains. Much less time has been spent on their counterpart, canyons; especially landscapes that feature rocky cliffs and canyons without mountains, such as the Colorado Plateau in the Southwestern United States. We experimented with existing and new techniques that can be composited to create maps of canyonlands that emphasize their ruggedness and beauty, and help visitors more effectively understand and travel through them.

Introducing Tiled Texture Shading
Leland Brown, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal
Texture shading is an algorithm to enhance visual detail in canyons, ridges, and structural features of a terrain. But suppose you want a seamless map of a very large area. If you divide the map into tiles and texture shade each one separately, the tiles won't match properly at the edges. Until now, the only solution was to process the entire dataset as a unit, potentially needing more time or memory space than you have available. Now the algorithm has been extended to process tiles individually while taking into account their context in the surrounding map. The result is texture-shaded tiles that fit together seamlessly into a single image. This makes texture shading practical even on datasets of 100,000 x 100,000 pixels or larger.

Mapping Black Women’s Independence: Uncovering Hidden Homeowners
Mia Nigro, Department of Geography at University of Nebraska Omaha
The process of researching and mapping historically disenfranchised populations can be challenging. As part of research with the Omaha Spatial Justice Project, we began investigating historic Black homeownership in Omaha. In the process, we discovered that this included a previously overlooked population of unmarried women homeowners. This paper will discuss the work to identify, locate, and map these homeowners and acknowledge their contributions to the Omaha landscape. This work represents an effort to use cartography to represent “women’s geographies, spaces, and experiences through maps.”

Park Slam Dunk: Scoring with StoryMaps
Eliana Macdonald, Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation
Park Slam Dunk isn’t your average StoryMap—it’s a full-court press of excitement! We’re talking alley-oops of data, crossovers of community engagement, and three-pointers of storytelling. Playbook highlights include:
Full-Court Data Drive: We’ll break down how we dribbled through spreadsheets, slam-dunked project timelines, and bounce-passed budgets. Our secret weapon? A heatmap that shows where we need more dog parks.
Fast Break Narratives: Imagine weaving project updates into halftime pep talks. “Team, we’re down by two swings, but the seesaw pivot is coming in hot!” We’ll share how we kept the crowd engaged with play-by-play narratives.

Branching Out: Navigating Kentucky's Urban Tree Canopy Grant Adventure
Rebecca Ramsey, Kentucky Division of Forestry
In February, the Kentucky Division of Forestry (KDF) launched a $1.8 million Urban and Community Forestry Grant Assistance Program to enhance urban tree canopies in underserved communities. To help applicants, KDF used an ArcGIS Online Web Experience Build featuring an interactive Eligibility Map (based on Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool and Tree Equity Score data), a StoryMap detailing the methodology and grant specifics, Survey123 for initial contact, and a dashboard to track applications. Join us in exploring this Web Experience Build and see how we communicated this groundbreaking grant program and its eligible areas.

Cutting for New Openings: Alternative Representations of a Railway Line
Àlex Muñoz Viso, University of Kentucky
In this paper, I draw from Bergmann and Lally (2021) to explore the possibilities of cutting the map to represent (1) distance in non-mathematical terms and (2) urban space as a human experience. The paper reflects on the process of mapping urban railway infrastructure in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, emphasizing the disruption it creates to both the urban landscape and social life. Thus, the cut disrupts the map replicating how the railway disrupts urban space, opening new blank spaces in the canvas that offer new possibilities for cartographic representation. In my case, it allowed for the creation of a reflective space where testimonies narrate personal and community experiences and stories about life in an urban landscape ripped in half.

Census Maps for Public Knowledge
Jia Zhang, Center for Spatial Research, Columbia University
The census is a data-centric method of governing in theory only. In practice, as with most technocratically designed processes, it is a perfect storm of politics and bureaucracy. To visualize census data for public knowledge is to, on the one hand, show where and how people live, and on the other it is an opportunity to expose some of the hidden infrastructure surrounding how the data is made. This talk will cover a series of 8 maps that attempt to provide new entry points into and build more intuitive readings of large public datasets like the Census. Topics include the structure of census geographies, utilizing satellite imagery for comparisons, and the afterlife of census data in products like the Social Vulnerability Index.

Native and Indigenous Critical Cartography and Counter-mapping Panel with Elspeth Iralu and Laurel Mei-Singh
Drawing on their research and experience, speakers in this panel will examine how counter-mapping and decolonial initiatives challenge colonial mapping practices and recenter Native and Indigenous communities and methodologies. Speakers will broadly explore the intersections of cartography, Indigenous spatial justice, carceral geography, spaces of resistance, and counter-mapping.

Rectifying a Map of Indian Country
Elspeth Iralu, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico
In this talk, I consider the legal category of Indian Country and how cartographers’ understanding of what makes up Indian Country influences the maps we imagine possible. Indian Country is a formal, legal term historically used in the United States to refer to all land within the borders of reservations. It has also been used within military operations to refer to “enemy” territory globally. Here, I consider what it might mean to understand Indian Country beyond its finite, legal boundaries to extend to an affective, felt experience of Indigenous presence. How might we represent this cartographically? How might we build on developments in Indigenous geographies to communicate this felt knowledge of place?

The Carceral Geographies of US Militarism
Laurel Mei-Singh, Assistant Professor of Geography & Environment and Asian American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
The climate crisis has advanced the global dialogue about the environmental ravages of war and its impacts on marginalized people. This study of Native Hawaiians confronting the US military on O‘ahu’s contested land expands this critique to examine the environmental justice dimensions of carceral geographies. Carceral geographies involve ongoing partitioning that enforces uneven access to resources by criminalizing lifeways that draw from interdependence with the natural world. At the same time, Hawaiian paradigms premised on human-environment interconnection persist, competing with US territorial domination. As such, the carceral geographies of US militarism regulate and contain placemaking practices that yield viable alternatives to capitalism and war.

Demonstrating the power of real-time data mining, map design, and collaboration, the Atlas in a Day Challenge asks participants to create maps based on a one-word theme to be compiled into an atlas–all within 24 hours. This one-day challenge will begin with the reveal of the atlas theme at the NACIS Business Lunch. Enjoy the camaraderie of your fellow NACIS guerrillas as we collectively build and compile our crowdsourced atlas narrative. The final atlas will be available as a free, downloadable PDF on Guerrilla Cartography’s website, with a print version offered at cost to participants after the event.

Meghan Kelly, Syracuse University; Jim Thatcher, Oregon State University; Bill Limpisathian, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Heather Rosenfeld, Smith College; Laura Kurtzberg, Florida International University; LaToya Gray-Sparks, Virginia Commonwealth University; Avery Everhart, University of British Columbia

What should cartographic curricula look like today? Our mapping tools, theoretical approaches and concepts, readings, assignments, and strategies for assessment are shifting. Also in flux are those who are recognized as doing mapping or teaching. Such changes call for reflection and updates. Here, we convene early-career educators who are devising new cartography curricula for new classes or are rethinking and revising existing curricula through critical cartographic and pedagogic lenses. Our panelists will share and discuss their experiences, insights, and new visions for cartographic curricula that reflect contemporary cartography and pedagogy in both theory and practice.

Mapping Vitality in Earth Systems
Maggie Camillos, Clancy Wilmott & Alexis Wood, University of California, Berkeley
Understanding the earth as alive is essential to developing the relationship of respect and reciprocity with our environment, which is necessary for long-term human evolution and to deepen our scientific understanding of interconnectivity amongst earth systems. Essential to developing this understanding is both reframing our understanding of vitality itself and developing visualization techniques to communicate this concept when applied to earth systems. Thus, the realm of earth systems science cartography is an important frontier in the development of a living understanding of the earth. In this presentation, I will offer an emergent conceptualization of vitality that incorporates earth systems, and critique traditional earth systems cartography in pursuit of an emergent cartographic technique in line with this definition.

Washington State Through Terrain and Time
Daniel Coe, Washington Geological Survey
From the canyons and coulees of the high desert—to the ice-capped volcanoes of the Cascade Range—to the wild coastline at the edge of the Pacific, Washington State harbors a treasure trove of topographic gems. At the Washington Geological Survey, we tell the story of these landforms through interpretive maps and imagery. In this presentation, we will go on a cartographic tour of the state using high-resolution elevation data as our guide.

Mountains of Evidence: Using Forensic Landscape Photography and GIS to Prosecute Illegal Hunting in the Remote Mountain Landscapes of Canada’s Yukon Territory
Gerry Perrier, Yukon Department of Environment
Big game hunting is an annual activity for many Yukon residents who hunt primarily for subsistence. Non-residents hunt with a licensed professional outfitter, focused more on trophies. Yukon's vast wilderness requires careful wildlife management to sustain hunter harvests due to a growing human population. Regulations dictate eligible species, timing and location of hunting activities. Geographic location plays a crucial role in managing wildlife and regulating hunting. Although most hunters follow the rules, some do not. This presentation presents three illegal hunting cases, illustrating how investigators use field photography, topographic modeling, and cartographic design to prove geographic location in court.

Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Power Generation from Interconnected Solar Arrays in San Juan County, Washington
Matt Sommer, Penn State University
Distributed rooftop solar arrays that are interconnected into the electrical distribution grid, have variable output in space and time which may not match well with demand. Small utilities may not have good methods to analyze when and where generation is happening. Using the interactive visualization capabilities of a Shiny web application based on historical smart meter data, can offer a way to analyze and understand when and where solar panels are providing power to the grid. This application uses the Shiny web framework to implement spatial and temporal filtering on distributed generation data. The data is visualized in the dashboard to show where, when, and how much power is generated, providing a glimpse into the spatial and temporal variability of distributed energy resources.

Taking UCSF’s Health Atlas National
Eric Brelsford & Kelsey Taylor, Stamen Design
Stamen Design recently worked with UC San Francisco to update and expand their Health Atlas. The Health Atlas is an interactive map that gives users ways to compare demographic and socioeconomic data with data about health care and health outcomes, from the state level down to the census tract. The Atlas was originally created to display data about California, but it now covers all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Come hear about how we handled the challenges around displaying granular data at the national level, created supplementary visualizations that help users understand and explore the data, and crafted the cartography that ties it all together, incorporating user feedback along the way.

A Field of Honor Forever: Mapping Flight 93 National Memorial
Alex Fries, U.S. National Park Service
Established in 2002 and first opened in 2015, Flight 93 National Memorial in Somerset County, Pennsylvania honors the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93, one of the four aircraft seized by terrorists during the September 11 attacks and, due to the courageous actions of its passengers and crew, the only plane which did not reach its intended target.  The combination of the memorial’s mission to retell the story of a tragedy that still occupies living memory, and the rather iterative nature of its construction has made this one of the more challenging NPS units to map in recent years. This talk will thus be a brief overview of my role in developing a set of maps for the park’s ongoing project to overhaul some of its interpretive media, including a refreshed Unigrid brochure and a new wayside exhibit. In particular, I will discuss the sort of balancing act that needed to be managed between conveying the story of Flight 93 with both the power and sensitivity it deserves; and the reality of making practical considerations that ensure the maps will remain useful for orientation and storytelling to the widest audience possible—among them being a design decision for the new park map that largely breaks from NPS tradition and may in fact be the first park brochure map to implement the technique in question.

A Land Acknowledgment Map for Northern Utah
Ryan Frazier, Weber State University
This short talk will display the Land Cessation map created for Northern Utah and Weber State University regions. We will address the process that led us to the current map and show a few steps and iterations that we took to arrive at this current version.

Illustrating Ahupuaʻa , the Hawaiian System of Land Stewardship
Rosemary Wardley, National Geographic
Come join as a cartographer makes more of a graphic and less of a map and explore what can be learned from embracing the collaborative process working with Indigenous Hawaiian artists and knowledge holders. Featured in the July National Geographic Special Issue on Indigenous Futures, Ancient Practice, Future Promise is an illustration that looks at the historical and future applications of ahupa'a land divisions.

Mushing and Mapping: Finding the Ancient Cedars of the Boundary Waters
Jake Steinberg, Minnesota Star Tribune
News cartographers don't often get out into the field. But in February, the Minnesota Star Tribune sent me on a 5-day dogsled journey into the Boundary Waters to find what may be the oldest tree in the state—a cedar said to be over a thousand years old. In this talk, I will discuss how this journey informed my map design, the nuances of spelling Indigenous place names, adapting historical maps into a pastiche style, and breaking down organizational silos to make a cross-departmental project like this happen.

Where Rivers, Mountains and People Meet
Jeff Clark, Clark Geomatics
A spectacular route from Vancouver to Pemberton links the Pacific Ocean to the snowy peaks of the Coastal Mountains in SW British Columbia. Scenic Highway 99 clings to the eastern slope of Howe Sound, a glacier-carved fiord, through Squamish and north alongside the Cheakamus River as it makes its way past Whistler to Pemberton. The Lil’wat, one of the First Peoples of the Sea to Sky, aptly refer to their home as the place “where rivers, mountains and people meet.” This talk will cover my cartographic decisions, tools, techniques and data used to create the terrain, and how I incorporated First Nations place names to recognize the long indigenous presence in the area to produce this geographically expressive map – The Essential Geography of the Sea To Sky.

Creating a Digital, Indigenous Walking Tour of UW-Madison: Reflections on Collaboration, Justice, and Place
Gareth Baldrica-Franklin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mapping Teejop is a digital walking tour centered on Indigenous history and presence on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. This presentation discusses the multi-layed process of creating Mapping Teejop, particularly the importance of collaboration and flexibility with students and community members. Walking tours can evoke a more intimate connection to place, and this project is situated without our attempts to reinforce the position of campus as an Indigenous place.

Wairarapa Glistening Water: Reflections on a Co-Designed Spatial Narrative Virtual Reality (VR) App
Mairead de Roiste, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington
Kahungunu ki Wairarapa and the SpatialThink Lab at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington co-designed and co-created a simple spatial VR (Virtual Reality) application for a unique storytelling experience for five wetlands in the Wairarapa in Aotearoa New Zealand. We use ambisonic sound, 360-degree video, landscape representation, and recorded narratives composed by Kahungunu to tell the korero (stories) of these wetlands.
This presentation will detail the collaborative underpinnings of the project and discuss the decisions and compromises made to represent the wetlands while following the needs and values of the iwi (tribe).

Raster-to-Vector Heat Maps: Multiscale Visualization Approach to Mapping and Interacting with Big Geospatial Data
Yanbing Chen, University of Wisconsin - Madison
This project is an ongoing project that aims to create a multiscale visualization approach for rendering big geospatial data on the web. By seamlessly transitioning between raster and vector heat maps based on zoom level, the project will enhance the utility and performance of interactive web maps. Using tools like Datamaps, Tippecanoe, and MapboxGL JS, the project will develop a prototype to evaluate optimal transition points and visual consistency techniques. This approach will make geospatial data more accessible and usable, benefiting fields such as urban planning, transportation analysis, and environmental science.

Who Owns Massachusetts?: A New Interactive Map or Identifying Institutional Ownership
Eric Huntley, Asya Aizman, & Milan Chuttani, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Institutional ownership of residential properties is a matter of urgent concern, but one that is obfuscated by the difficulty of identifying shared ownership given the common practice of creating a different LLC for each property. This presents, among other things, a data science problem, in that identifying the scale of shared ownership requires entity resolution approaches that are dependent on access to multiple large datasets. We will present a new interactive map, Who Owns Massachusetts, that attempts to make discover of institutional ownership possible throughout the Commonwealth. We will introduce the tool's functionality, novel datasets we are making available in building the tool, and future directions for development and research.

All the Joys of Mapping (and Seeing!) the Total Solar Eclipse of 2024
K.K. Rebecca Lai, William B. Davis & Josh Katz, The New York Times
The total solar eclipse of 2024 captured the attention of millions as it crossed North America on April 8, 2024. To help readers get the best experience possible, our team created a cloud forecast map to help readers find the best spots. We will share our design and development process, the lovely reader feedback we got and our own experience of seeing a total solar eclipse for the first time. On eclipse day, we also published a video of satellite imagery showing the shadow of the moon as it passed across the Earth.

Unidrome: Mapping Every Aerodrome Worldwide with Cloud Native Data
Alex Polvi, Barbless Maps
Building on our backcountry aviation mapping journey, the Unidrome project expands to a global scale, unifying all known open datasets to map known place to land an airplane in the world. We'll explore the integration of cloud native data, geospatial analysis, and aviation software, highlighting the innovative methods and challenges encountered. This project also serves as a case study for constructing and organizing cloud-native geospatial data, offering insights and best practices for similar large-scale endeavors.

A Complicated Wilderness: Mapping Guadalupe Mountains National Park
Becca Holdhusen, U.S. National Park Service
Guadalupe Mountains encompasses complex cultural narratives that extend well beyond the park boundary. In this talk, I provide background about the park’s geology, ecology, and cultural history and the ways these pieces have shaped the story of a lesser known park. I review a series of 3D and planimetric maps I made for the park and invite the audience to speculate about ways to include interpretive clues that would give map readers a deeper understanding of the cultural context of the park.

Exploring Intra-Annual Variations in Urban Effects on Precipitation in the Atlanta, GA, USA Region
Olamiposi Fagunloye, Georgia State University
This study investigates the intra-annual variations in urban effects on precipitation in the rapidly urbanizing Atlanta, GA region. By analyzing over two decades of precipitation data from 70 stations, along with land cover, imperviousness, and atmospheric reanalysis data, the research aims to determine the spatial variability and seasonal differences in urban impacts on precipitation totals, frequency, and intensity. Geostatistical techniques like kriging will generate high-resolution precipitation surfaces, while correlation analyses will assess the relationship between upwind urban land and precipitation characteristics. The findings will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of urbanization's influence on precipitation patterns, informing urban planning and water resource management strategies.

Nat Case, INCase, LLC; Aileen Buckley, Esri; Martin Gamache, National Geographic Society; Neil Allen, East View Companies; Tim Wallace, New York Times; Brooke Marston, U.S. State Department

What would a general code of ethics in cartography look like? Any code needs some sort of structure to back it up: companies, licensing professional groups, and some organizations have them, with varying degrees of enforcement. So as a field where practitioners are unlicensed, work for a wide range of employers and clients, and come from spectrum of educational and work backgrounds, is there a basis for a broader code? Do we as cartographers have a way of standing up to non-cartographers who ask us do things that are “wrong” as mapping? This panel discussion will start with short presentations by presenters about how codes of ethics work within their work context, and then we will discuss how these might be reflected into the wider field.

Visualizing a Contemporary Humanitarian Crisis: Exploratory Mapping of Migrant Deaths from the Unstructured Text of Newspaper Accounts
Rachel Daniell, Pratt School of Information & Molly Miranker, Texas State University
How might we visualize a humanitarian crisis when available geospatial data is limited? We navigate this question in our ongoing research on deaths of migrating persons along the US-Mexico border, where thousands have perished but documentation has been limited in scope and form. Our current work explores mapping unstructured text data from Texas newspapers to further document places where human remains have been found -- seeking to map approximate coordinates and qualitative terms like “near the county road” and “along the river.” We will present cartographic expressions of these data and discuss with the audience potential ways to map qualitative data on humanitarian crises and what such maps might raise, recenter, and uncover.

Visualizing Change Over Time on the Web
Jeremy Bartley, Esri
There are various ways to visualize how to visualize how spatial data changes over time in both print and online cartography. This session provides an overview of 10 different approaches to visualizing change over time on the web. We will cover both cartographic styles that focus on time, the role of animation, and newer techniques such as geo-referenced streaming high-definition videos that show changes on the earth over time in a rich and interactive way. Each method will be described with examples showing scenarios when each type of visualization works well and when it struggles.

Close: an Interactive, Multi-Modal Travel Time Map
Nathaniel Henry, Henry Spatial Analysis
Close (https://close.city/) is an interactive web map showing travel times to nearby amenities via walking, biking, and public transit across every block in the United States. This presentation describes how Close visualizes travel times from 8 million city blocks to 4 million destinations using publicly-available data sources and tools, with an emphasis on newly-released data from the Overture Maps project. Common public reactions, incorporating crowdsourced feedback, and extensions of Close will also be covered.

Navigating Election Night: Behind the Scenes of Visualizing 2024 Election Results
Clare Trainor, Reuters
Not all news coverage is breaking news. Some events happen every year, every two years, or even every 4 years, like the U.S. presidential election. This talk breaks down how the Reuters Graphics team built a component-based system to visualize results for the 2024 election. I will explain the challenges of working with real-time election data, our process for combining results with geographic data, the design hurdles we faced, plus how we tested our components to ensure accurate results are shown on election night to our readers.

High-Resolution Elevation Tiles for Enhanced Terrain Rendering
Lee France & Tony Cannistra, onX Maps
3D mapping is now common across many applications and industries, yet a high-resolution 3D Map tailored to outdoor enthusiasts has been lacking. onX maps, a company focused on mapping our natural spaces, has attempted to fill that void by developing highly detailed elevation tiles built from lidar resolution data. These new elevation tiles are allowing us to render landscapes in incredible 3D detail helping users of these maps better understand and interpret crucial terrain features. In this talk we’ll dive into why we tackled this major challenge, how we did it and take a look at some of the beautiful map products resulting from this incredible elevation data.

Maps as Poetry
Richard Bohannon, Metro State University—Saint Paul
Maps tell a story, but tell it slant. While they have long been used as narrative aids (such as in Esri’s Story Maps), most maps do not have a linear, narrative structure and the story-telling aspect of mapping is often metaphorical – maps have agendas and perspectives. This paper proposes a complementary, alternative metaphor -- maps as poetry – using historic and contemporary maps to show how poetry might be a helpful model for the work of maps and the map-making process. Both poetry and maps are sparing and restrained – poetry in its use of language, maps in their selections from the landscape. Both also use rhythm and balance (aural for poems, visual for maps) to evoke a particular mood, feeling or tenor. Poetry is a particularly useful metaphor because, like most maps, it can be non-linear, conveying ideas through images without walking the audience directly through their meaning.

Revitalization of a University Building Interior: Abstracting Geographies Through Cartographic Public Art Installations
Cynthia Brewer, Penn State Geography
Public art fits within a broader discourse of university renovation, undertaken to attract and retain students, enhancing the appearance and functionality of campus environments. We describe cartographically inspired floor and wall designs for a renovated space within the Department of Geography at Penn State. Hallway floor designs used pentagonal tiles, creating a coarse rasterization of local physical features and historical movement paths. Back-lit wall panels have a global emphasis. High-contrast shapes were chosen from six continents. They show human (building footprints, parcels, and indigenous land claims) and physical patterns (major rivers, lagoons, and ice). A local panel shows the ridge-and-valley terrain of central Pennsylvania.

The Cartographic Art of the Opposite of Bespoke
Nicholas Bauch, Esri
Pixel-perfect detailing, custom tracing, nudging hex codes: all marks of the artistic precision we adore in powerful cartographic design. But how might we maintain adherence to strong spatial storytelling when creating a large number of maps for an audience who, on average, won’t spend more than 8 seconds reading them? Frequently absent of legends and even text, geographical representation goes to new places when designing maps “at scale.” From the perspective of MapX—the carto team for Esri’s public-facing website—I outline challenges, and share design system strategies that help answer the question: “how to show the beauty and elucidative capacity of cartography when there are nearly 2,500 web pages calling for new, cutting-edge maps?

Drawing Participation: A Real-Time, Peer-to-Peer Tool for Participatory Planning and Design
Carlos Sandoval Olascoaga, Northeastern University
Drawing Participation (DP) was created to increase accessibility and to provide a scalable and open platform for shared planning and design. DP is a peer-to-peer, collaborative Geospatial Computing System tool that integrates drawing, mapping, spatial analysis, version-control, and algorithms for design synthesis. Drawing Participation is a model for collective and collaborative planning methods and interfaces that enable large groups of people to work together in ill-defined design problems. In this presentation we will present, first, the conceptual and technical background of DP, second, the technical implementations of the tool, and third, a case study of the implementation of the tool to collaboratively develop parcel maps in informal settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A Pop-Up Book: Visualizing the Spatial Sensitivity Analysis
Seda Salap-Ayca, Brown University; Zhu Gaocanyue, Emma Hogarth & Georgia Rhodes, Rhode Island School of Design
Sensitivity analysis plays a crucial role in deepening our understanding of models and facilitating clearer communication of their results by accounting for variations in output and their dependency on inputs. When applied spatially, sensitivity analysis generates individual maps for the effects of each input as well as for their interactions. However, the challenge lies in simplifying the visual presentation of spatial sensitivity results. This project is a fusion of art and science designed to address this multidimensional visualization challenge by leveraging a pop-up structure to convey mapping information. The first layer of the book cover features graticules representing latitudes and longitudes, providing a foundational framework. The second layer, constituting the main body of the map, utilizes vibrant color zones to distinguish between regions, while blank spaces denote missing data. These colors, produced through a marbling technique, symbolize the intricate relationship between input and output in spatial models, illustrating how variations in input can yield diverse outputs. The third layer employs Turkish map folding, incorporating paper mechanisms shaped like collapsible houses, which cleverly obscure internal information, necessitating audience interaction to unveil insights. This folding structure transforms the map from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, adding depth and complexity while retaining visual appeal. By integrating artful design with scientific rigor, this project offers a novel approach to conveying spatial sensitivity analysis results, making them more accessible and engaging to a wider audience.

Mapping the Final Frontier from the Inside Out
Jere Suikkila, Mappedin
Wayfinding has come a long way–from stick and stone star charts to HD mapping with centimeter accuracy, and autonomous vehicle guidance. Yet, when we look at city maps around the world we see the stark reality. 99% of buildings are unmapped. With all of today’s technologies, how can our built world be so opaque? In this talk, we’ll explore the indoor challenges we face, and how they can be solved. We’ll discover the similarities and differences between outdoor and indoor mapping. And, you’ll find an exciting future of indoor navigation where one map everywhere truly connects people, businesses, and information.

Re-Imagining the Creation of Vintage-Style Maps: Old West
Chinna Subbaraya Siddharth Ramavajjala & Billy Roberts, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Identification of digitally translatable aesthetics is a critical design decision involved in recreating a vintage map. Often, vintage effects are limited to blending of discolored paper or adding texture. To create a “precise” vintage map from an era, cartographer should not only be cognizant of the geography and history of the mapped geography, but also print techniques used. Therefore, we would like to present a formalized cartographic workflow to perform a holistic design transfer and discuss techniques utilized in creation of old west maps.

Mapping Urban Wilds in Watercolor: Nature and Humanity Interwoven in India and South Africa
Darren Sears, Independent Artist-Cartographer
This talk will build on the theme of last year’s—my collage-like watercolor maps, accentuating edges around pieces of the natural world, intended to capture a sense of fragility and imminent collapse but at the same time unintentionally recasting that instability as ecological flow and flux that can itself be considered natural. I will present two watercolors depicting urban-nature interfaces, one in Cape Town and the other (largely imagined) combining multiple places in Rajasthan, India. These works have turned out to emphasize, in very different ways, the interpretation of ecological change as perennial and energizing rather than necessarily destructive—as representing the inherent dynamism and interconnectivity of human and natural processes.

Wild World Goes Worldwide: Tales from an Extraordinary Map Launch
Anton Thomas, Anton Thomas Art
After a 3-year odyssey drawing Wild World – a vast world map of nature – I put my colored pencils aside to launch prints. Anticipation had built up over the years, so meeting the demand was always going to be challenging. But when the map received an array of international press coverage, that challenge spiraled into an extraordinary period of intensity. This is the story of a small map business managing rapid growth: how it happened, how I managed it, and what I learned about business, media, and cartography. It’s one thing to follow your heart creating maps, but creating a thriving business to support that passion is another. I’m excited to share my journey! Plus – I discuss what's next for my mapmaking in the aftermath of Wild World.

3D Oblique Mapping of Mountains Above the Arctic Circle: Two Maps of Alaska’s Remote National Parks
Joe Milbrath, U.S. National Park Service
This presentation will explore techniques and a short tutorial describing the creation of two National Park Service maps for Bering Land Bridge National Preserve and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. The talk will share approaches to mapping expansive mountainous terrain with the help of Terrain Texture Shading and Eduard, a Swiss-style terrain rendering software. I’ll explore the use of high-resolution land cover data, satellite imagery, and approaches to digitizing complex hydro datasets for oblique views.

Don't forget to pack your running shoes for Thursday evening's 10th NACIS fun run. This year, we are honoring Carl Sack, who has organized and championed the NACIS Annual fun run for years. Jim Thatcher will lead this year's memorial fun walk and run — see you there!

 
We're trying something new this year! Have dinner on your own as usual, then join us back at the Hotel Murano for a low-key evening with carto-pals old and new - we’ll have puzzles, board games, and crafts. We also encourage you to bring your mappy games or host map-related activities at our Night In. We’ll meet at the Map Gallery!

If you want to host an activity, you can advertise it on the message board near the registration desk or via the #nacis2024-night-in slack channel.

Note that per hotel regulations, absolutely no outside food allowed. You can order drinks and food from the hotel bar.

The conference committee won’t be organizing a NACIS Night Out this year. Have dinner on your own, and we encourage you to find fellow cartographers who would love to explore Tacoma’s breweries and enjoy the local nightlife. We’ll have a message board near the registration desk where you can leave Night Out ads, or organize via the #nacis2024-night-out slack channel.