NACIS 2024

Towards a Cartographic Ethics: Summarizing and Synthesizing 35 Years of Academic Debate
Lucinda Roberts, University of Oregon
In 1990, J.B. Harley, asked, “Can There be a Cartographic Ethics?” He asked that question amidst a period of theoretical angst for the cartographic community, where, following the invention, development, and commercialization of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), cartographers were left wondering how new technologies would upend traditional workflows. Nearly 35 years later, we have not come closer to answering Harley’s question with an actionable set of professional ethics. As the technology we use to construct maps rapidly develops and forces cartographers to update their workflows, the academic theory underpinning mapmaking has changed too. Emerging technologies are once again posing a paradigm shift to our standard workflows, the proliferation of generative AI pushes us towards articulating a practical cartographic ethics. This presentation seeks to summarize and synthesize debates on ethics in the cartographic literature, to ground existing calls for professional cartographic ethics in the existing debates and theory over the last 35 years.

“The Map is Hers”: Gender and Copyright in Early 20th Century Los Angeles
Christina Dando, University of Nebraska Omaha
In the United States, maps and charts have had the possibility of copyright protection since 1783, but not all mapmakers take this step. In Los Angeles in the 1910s, Laura Whitlock, a woman mapmaker, and N. Bowditch Blunt, a draftsman, both copyrighted their maps. Blunt would go on to illegally copy Whitlock’s work and Whitlock sued him for copyright infringement, resulting in a precedent-setting case. Why did they copyright their work? How did they know to take this step? What might copyright have represented to them?

Unearthing Geotechnical Knowledge in the Library
Chris Salvano, LA Metro Transportation Research Library & Archive
Since 1962, the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) has been performing geotechnical studies throughout Los Angeles County to support its subway and light-rail transportation initiatives. Beginning in late 2023, the LA Metro Library began surfacing spatial data from these historical reports and mapping them using GIS. This talk will discuss the library-led initiative to map this data as a means to help answer spatial inquiry-type reference questions, improve discoverability of Metro’s geotechnical knowledge, and better meet the information-seeking behaviors of Metro engineers. New avenues of potential collaboration between the library, the GIS unit, and engineers will also be addressed.

A New Look at Sketch Maps
Michael Peterson, University of Nebraska at Omaha
The sketch map is an externalization or translation of a mental map, an internal coding of reality that we depend upon to both navigate in a local environment and process information about the world at large. Our every movement and our thoughts about the spatial world are dependent upon these internal representations. They are formed primarily by experiencing the environment directly, or indirectly through maps. The question examined here is how sketch maps, and the mental maps on which they are based, are themselves influenced by maps. Do they represent the foundation of cartography?

OpenHistoricalMap: the Most Open-Ended Map in History
Minh Nguyễn, OpenHistoricalMap
OpenHistoricalMap (openhistoricalmap.org) is a time machine brought to you by the community that built OpenStreetMap. Zoom into any neighborhood in the world, turn to any time period in history, and there you will find the same micromapping detail you’ve come to expect in OpenStreetMap or – more likely – an utterly blank invitation to help build the most open-ended map in history, one story at a time.