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.
