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.

The Azimuthal Arctic
John Cloud, The Arctic Studies Center & National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution
Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594) and Richard Edes Harrison (1901-1994) researched and created important maps of the boreal and Arctic realms, for distinctly different purposes, almost half a millennium apart. But both cartographers were illuminating climate change, based on their own historical research, their acute observations of their eras, and their mastery of globes. Their azimuthal perspectives were foundational, and will remain the keys to our own responses to climate change.

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.