NACIS 2024

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 t

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.