NACIS 2024

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.