NACIS 2024

Modeling Bicycle Ridership: Challenges, Opportunities, and Scalable Solutions for Northwest Arkansas
Nelofar Qulizada
This paper addresses the growing significance of bicycling in urban settings and the challenges in accurately estimating bicyclist counts. The objective is to enhance current methods and improve the placement of counters within Northwest Arkansas. Existing studies often need to provide precise estimates, prompting the need for a more comprehensive approach. Our methodology involves a thorough comparative analysis of data from various sources, including crowdsourced, contextual, and location-specific data. We tune the values of the model parameters to obtain the best fit for our data from multiple sources and then assess accuracy by comparing our model predictions to independent ground truth measurements that were not used to fit the model.

Measuring Trust in Maps: Introducing the MAPTRUST Scale
Timothy Prestby, Penn State University
Contemporary research on trust in maps is limited by inconsistent and untested measures of trust. This talk outlines the development and evaluation of the MAPTRUST Scale: a numerical rating scale that exclusively measures the degree to which someone trusts a map. Accordingly, we found that trust in maps can be measured by asking people to rate how well a set of 12 adjectives describe a map: accurate, correct, error-free, honest, trustworthy, credible, fair, reliable, reputable, objective, authentic, and balanced. This scale can be a useful tool for researchers and practitioners alike to measure an individual’s trust in maps.

Building the Definitive Draft for River Craft: The John Day Boater's Guide
Gabriel Rousseau & Monica Morin, Bureau of Land Management
The Bureau of Land Management recently published a comprehensive boater's guide for The John Day River. The John Day drains nearly 8,100 square miles of central and northeast Oregon. It is one of the nation’s longest undammed rivers, 147.5 miles of which were designated as a Wild & Scenic River by Congress in 1988. This talk will take you through the three-year process of field work, data collection, content writing, layout & design, and revision. This guide maps 185 river miles at 1 inch to 1/2 mile and is an invaluable resource for education, navigation, safety, and maintaining a sustainable ecosystem.

What Does it Mean to Understand a Map?
Amy Griffin, RMIT University & Anthony Robinson, Penn State University
Generative AI technologies can do a remarkably good job of (re)producing digital representations of some things that exist in the material world (though not maps yet!). Some images produced by tools like DallE-3 or Midjourney look remarkably "real". To achieve these outcomes, AI technologies employ statistics to characterize the datasets they are fed and identify patterns in these datasets. When scholars and practitioners describe how artificial intelligence technologies work, we say they "learn" things about the world. But does AI really understand anything? This talk will explore the question of what it means to understand a map and to what extent AI technologies can understand maps.

“By Dint of Some Unshowy Beauty”: a Concordance Analysis of Aesthetic Vocabulary in Cartographic Textbooks 1928-2023
Chelsea Nestel, University of Wisconsin - Madison
How has Euro academic cartography arrived at its current aesthetic epistemologies? I examine this question using corpus analysis from linguistics, analyzing the changing in-line usage of the word aesthetics and related words design, taste, beauty, art, and style. My analysis reveals how aesthetic concepts such as judgment, value, objects, attitude, and experience have been expressed over time. These aesthetic concepts are integral not just to how maps are made, but how they are experienced and used, constructing cartographically “good” maps.

Applying Indigenous Research and Data Practices Panel with Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, Ph.D. and Annita Hetoevehotohke'e Lucchesi
This panel will explore the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge and data practices into cartography. Speakers will discuss how modern cartographic practices can improve to support Indigenous communities and how considerations for decolonizing cartographic practices help address colonial power dynamics and violence perpetuated via maps. This panel will broadly focus on issues related to data violence, data sovereignty, ethical and equitable collaboration and research, and Indigenous research practices and knowledge.


A Recipe for Ethical Geographic Work with Indigenous Communities
Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, Ph.D. (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe), Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada
This talk approaches methods and guidelines for decolonial geographic research through a lens of conducting ethical, respectful research with Indigenous communities in human and physical geography, and across the quantitative-qualitative spectrum. Using a historical and contemporary discussion of the entanglement of the discipline of Geography with colonial and imperial structures, along with an overview of potential steps that researchers should bear in mind when engaging with Indigenous communities in research endeavors, this talk works to answer the key questions: What comprises decolonial research? How can researchers in Geography work towards accomplishing it in a way that is attentive to the needs of communities they work with and within, while meeting their own research objectives? Special attention is paid to the unique needs of students and early career scholars.

Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Cartography for Self-Determination and Indigenous Wellbeing
Annita Hetoevehotohke'e Lucchesi
This presentation explores the intersections of data sovereignty and Indigenous self-determination, and how applying Indigenous data sovereignty principles to cartography can advance Indigenous self-determination and wellbeing. Cartography is often imagined as a centuries-long harmful, settler-imposed practice enabling genocide and land removal; what if we reimagined it as a practice that facilitated Indigenous land (re)connection, lifeways, safety, and healing? In this presentation, Lucchesi will offer her experiences exploring that question as a Cheyenne geographer.

How to Write a Cartography Tutorial
Heather Smith, Esri
I’ve been writing cartography tutorials at Esri for almost six years. I’d like to share some of the methods, tricks, and principles that I’ve learned and employed over that time, including:
1) How to keep a tutorial short without sacrificing learning objectives.
2) How to go beyond button-clicking and explain how to make decisions.
3) How cartography skills translate to writing skills. (How becoming a better writer made me a better cartographer and vice versa.)

Cartography as Spatial Information Practices
Jack Swab, University of Kentucky
Definitions of cartography typically revolve around the construction and study of visual representations of geographic phenomena. In this presentation, I add to this definition by advancing the idea of cartography as the study of spatial information practices. Understanding how individuals find, evaluate, and use maps (and other forms of spatial information) is critical to advancing both the construction and study of maps. Although aspects of a spatial information practice exist in cartography currently—such as UI/UX or wayfinding research—by more readily centering a pluralistic view of spatial information practices we can expand cartography beyond the study of the visual.

Changes You Can Make to Your Workflows to Make More Accessible Maps
Vanessa Knoppke-Wetzel, GreenInfo Network
At GreenInfo Network, we have spent time in the last few years making changes to our interactive production workflows to improve accessibility in our web products, and we also continue to create accessible print maps for our clients and partners. I will share some of what we have learned about accessibility design for the web from the last few years, as well as share out tips and tricks from our experience with print products as well.

Creating an Organizational Cartography Guide
Gray McKenna, Washington State Department of Natural Resources
The National Audubon Society is a hemisphere-wide conservation organization that is known for its strong visual identity. Many Audubon employees are GIS users who regularly produce maps for outreach, planning, and advocacy. However, until recently, there were no Audubon-specific resources for designing maps. To address this need, we created a Cartography Guide using ArcGIS Hub. This guide empowers users of all skill levels to create high-quality, accessible maps that integrate Audubon’s visual identity. This presentation will cover how we created this guide to be responsive to our users’ wide range of needs, and the impact this guide has had on Audubon’s cartographic communications.

A Retrospective on a Career in Museum Mapping and GIS
Daniel Cole, Smithsonian Institution
For the past 39 years, I have served as the Smithsonian's cartographer. I started working with the Anthropology department at NMNH, researching, designing and creating maps for the Handbook of North American Indians and related work. In 1990-91, I moved to serving the entire Smithsonian for building GIS at the Institution while also providing cartographic work for any staff needing it for their publications and work in science, art, and history. Since 1999, I have also been involved with exhibits’ staff as well having contributed maps and geospatial data displays for over 20 exhibits in 7 museums, the Folklife Festival, SI Archives, and SITES. This presentation will review my past and present work until my retirement in December 2024.

Dynamic Deployment and Mirroring of PostGIS Geospatial Data Repositories using Kubernetes, Helm and Other Open Source Technologies - a System Component-Based Approach to Geospatial Data Sharing and Publication Chris Mader, Timothy Norris & Julio Perez, University of Miami
Online GIS repositories (implemented using technologies such as ArcGIS Hub, for example) typically support two models for data access: data download; and API support. Here will we present a system component model for data sharing based on Kubernetes and PostGIS. We are using this approach at the University of Miami as part of the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) Geospatial Digital Special Collections (GDSC) data resource. This approach enables the replication of fully functional sets of PostGIS databases combined with API services that can be used to build de-coupled software applications, as well as for other purposes where mirroring pieces of a repository is beneficial. We will also present a quick case study of an actual software application, that used replicated components, for illustration purposes.

Discovering and Explaining Ecological Connectivity
Mir Rodriguez Lombardo, Almanaque Azul foundation
Awareness of ecological connectivity has become critical in a rapidly changing world and increasing fragmentation of natural areas. I will talk about how we met the challenges of not only creating a high-resolution map of functional ecological connectivity for Panama, but also of how to effectively communicate the results. Making the map began by assembling various data sources, then surveying experts and finally many iterations of running the data through a connectivity algorithm (Omniscape). We interpreted the results informed by environmental threats, as well as local land and water defense struggles, then liaised with teachers to created a digital and paper map of "natural corridors" intended to be used in the classroom.

Handling Complex Content within Georeferenced Historical Atlases
Adam Cox, Healthy Regions & Policies Lab, UIUC
While georeferencing a single map is an easy one-off process, applying the work across a whole atlas (or multi-volume set) is a challenging task--especially when pages have multiple insets and the atlas contains more than one category of maps. How do you structure this work, and create cohesive output? This presentation will describe the novel hierarchical approach within OldInsuranceMaps.net, a crowdsourced web georeferencing platform designed around the complexities of Sanborn fire insurance maps. Facilitating the creation of seamless mosaics from this collection has resulted in a robust, abstract workflow that could be applied to any other maps or collections as well.

Using Old Maps for New Insights on America’s Cities
Riley Champine, University of Richmond
Given the widespread attention redlining has received in recent years, some might think studying old maps of housing discrimination has grown stale. But even after a decade of work by the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), fresh documents, stories, and data continue to surface, leading to the release of the third version of their flagship project, Mapping Inequality. This talk will explore the latest features and design enhancements of the project website, illustrating how they add depth to an expanded collection of redlining documents. We'll also discuss the DSL's latest project and our efforts to incorporate detailed Sanborn fire insurance maps into the study of urban health disparities in redlined areas.

Continuing a Classic: Map Use, 9th Edition
Patrick Kennelly, Aileen Buckley, Esri; & Jon Kimerling
No other cartography textbook has withstood the test of time like Map Use: Reading Analysis, Interpretation. Since its debut in 1978―nearly a half-century ago―it has remained a stalwart companion for instructors, students, self-learners, and professionals. Map Use, 9th Edition, allows us to not only update the book with some of the best maps recently made, and produce the book in both print and e-book format, but it also provides us with a unique perspective into what has changed over the years―and what has remained the same. It allows us to evaluate what is currently most important in map use and mapmaking so that we can, in effect, present the state of the art in those areas of our field. Yet, for all that has changed over the years, the underlying philosophy of Map Use remains the same―a good map user must understand, at a basic level, what goes into the making of a map.