NACIS 2024

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.