NACIS 2024

Using Interactive Maps to Enhance Healthcare Equity
Zachary Sherman,Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Our study utilizes a two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method to investigate disparities in healthcare accessibility from block groups within Virginia, focusing on both driving and transit modalities across various regions including Altavista, Greenville, Lynchburg, Richmond, Staunton, Williamsburg, and Winchester. By integrating demographic prevalence data from the CDC, we quantitatively assess accessibility scores for different social groups and locations. Our methodology employs advanced geospatial analysis techniques, leveraging Google API for precise travel time estimation. A key objective is identifying the social groups and block groups that exhibit the most significant disparities between car and transit accessibility scores. Preliminary findings indicate marked differences in service accessibility, highlighting areas and populations with critical needs. By pinpointing the block groups with the largest disparities in accessibility, our study not only sheds light on the spatial and social dimensions of healthcare equity but also informs targeted policy interventions aimed at bridging the gap between everyday citizens identifying nearby healthcare services. Leveraging ArcGIS Dashboards and ChatGPT, our team, and collaboration with the American Dental Association, we transform our accessibility data into actionable insights for policymakers and the general population. Our innovative AI integration methods allow policymakers and everyday people to perform spatial queries with an easy conversation-like interface. Using ChatGPT API, we train and leverage our accessibility data to prompt responses for both numeric responses and spatial queries, a limitation in the current status of geographic AI research.

Algorithmic Design Defaults: Implications and Possibilities
Jim Thatcher, Oregon State University; Meghan Kelly, Syracuse University & Craig Dalton, Hofstra University
This talk examines what we call taken-for-grantedness in some technologically-inflected design choices. Beginning from the ideas that maps are a means of telling stories and making claims about the world, this talk provides examples of how oft-unconsidered and routinely deployed algorithms are potential and realized sites of routinized design and algorithmic harm in how they present the world and in who they include and exclude from consideration. We focus on three cases in different registers of map making: projections, generalization, and classification. Each involves common algorithms deployed in cartographic workflows in classroom, government, agency, and research settings.

For Mapping in Folds: Space is Not a Grid
Alexis Wood, University of California, Berkeley
This presentation asks if the limitations of contemporary mapping can be traced to our tools or to limitations in our cartographic theory. Using an approach informed by the Deluzian fold and the Benjaminian constellation, I question cartographic scale and conceptions of spacetime through various material investigations.

The Pasifika Film Database: Mapping Islands, Oceans and Identities Beyond Imperialism and Militarisation
Clancy Wilmott, Sophia Perez & Elizabeth Fiske, University of California, Berkeley
In 2023-24, a team of researchers from the Critical Pacific Island Studies Collective at UC Berkeley assembled a database of films and documentaries set in the Pacific or directed by Pasifika filmmakers. This presentation discusses the myriad difficulties of translating this database into a web-map using pre-established mapping solutions in the context of the ongoing cartographic construction of the Pacific Ocean as a strategic region for militarization, territorialization, and annexation. To foreground self-determination, sovereignty, and epistemic justice, we argue that new cartographies are desperately needed, including island-centered feature sets, anti-imperialist systems of scale, and new visual conventions.

Mapping Reese Street: Black Cartographies and Community Mapping in Athens, Georgia
Jerry Shannon, Amber Orozco & Amy Andrews, University of Georgia
Our paper describes an ongoing community partnership to map the Reese Street neighborhood in Athens, Georgia. This historically Black neighborhood is recognized as both a national and local historic district, but few Black residents remain due to gentrification pressures. Our research works from the 1958 Athens city directory, archival records, and oral histories to map this community at the end of the Jim Crow era. Our partnership includes community members, academic geographers from the University of Georgia, and staff at a local historic preservation organization. This collaboration ensures that the results of this work can be used to advocate for policies that protect its remaining residents from displacement.

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.

Visualizing Multidimensional Climate Data on the Web with Zarr and @carbonplan/maps
Kata Martin & Shane Loeffler, CarbonPlan
Climate data (and many other scientific datasets) are often massive, multidimensional, and challenging to get into desktop GIS and cartography tools, let alone a web map. @carbonplan/maps is an open-source tool for efficiently visualizing this complex data on the web by leveraging the emerging Zarr format and WebGL. Here we showcase its use in a recent project exploring a new dataset simulating the efficiency of ocean alkalinity enhancement (OAE), a carbon removal technique. The OAE Efficiency Map allows exploration of nearly 700 global ocean simulations, allowing scientists and system actors to get a better sense of where and when the most effective carbon removal is possible.

Felt in Action
Mamata Akella, Felt
Felt is a powerful tool for data exploration, spatial analysis, cartography, and collaboration. It enables more people in your organization to work with maps and collaborate in real time through its modern, easy-to-use interface packed with powerful features. Join this talk to learn how to work with a variety of data formats, advanced filtering and search capabilities, robust spatial analysis tools, and intuitive cartographic controls that together, simplify the data exploration and mapmaking process and are uniquely Felt. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced professional, see how Felt improves workflows, enhances team communication, and enables informed decision-making through practical examples and a live demo.

Integrating Use-Specific Styles into a Generalized Map Hierarchy
Lauren James, Apple
Apple’s Maps app is constantly evolving as we create new offerings for our users. Our latest undertaking necessitated integrating new data into an existing hierarchical structure, with emphasis on a considered and balanced redesign of layers. This challenging puzzle included needed technical advancements across several codebases and a cross-functional effort. Maps’ Cartography team will present the design and data decisions behind this undertaking.

A New Tool For Interactive Flow Mapping
Paulo Raposo, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Drawing cartographically-refined origin-destination (OD) flow maps in automated or semi-automated digital contexts remains difficult. This research presents a new, interactive and semi-automated tool for OD flow map creation. Realized in a free and open-source application that runs using Python scripts and web technologies, this tool allows users to adjust the shape of OD flow arrows either universally or on a per-flow basis. A preview of the output flows is rendered live to the user as they make flow path adjustments. Output in georeferenced vector formats is exportable from the app for use in other settings, such as geographic information systems (GIS), web maps, or graphic design software.

Roots and Migrants
Chiamaka Nwajiaku & Professor Caglar Koylu, University of Iowa
I will present a web-based story map application, Roots & Migrants, aimed at increasing public scientific literacy and engagement with migration, kinship networks, and U.S. history.It is a part of an NSF project's broader impact activities, visualizing migration and family tree data alongside events, populations, and movements of underrepresented groups like Native Americans, African Americans, and Mexicans. Data will be extracted from historical sources; this accessible online tool helps the public and those with limited GIS background understand migration's challenges to First Nations. Roots & Migrants will be integrated into high school social studies curricula through collaborative workshops with teachers.

Comparative Evaluation of Univariate and Bivariate Choropleth Maps: Perceptual and Cognitive Insights from an Eye-Tracking Study
Michalis Kantartjis, University of Iowa
Our study evaluates univariate and bivariate choropleth maps using eye-tracking technology to uncover key perceptual and cognitive differences among tasks such as identifying patterns and comparing regions. Data analysis from 75 participants showed that bivariate maps, while initially challenging, enable more efficient, and in some tasks, accurate interpretation of complex spatial patterns. Self-reported measures indicated improved performance and reduced mental demand with bivariate maps. Additionally, our introduction of an interactive legend led users to explore the map interface more thoroughly. Gaze heatmaps and scan path analyses revealed distinct visual patterns, suggesting that bivariate maps, contrary to previous research, can enhance map reading efficiency.

Who’s On First: Ready for Map Display
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso, Kelso Cartography
The Who’s On First (WOF) gazetteer is a big list of places, each with a stable identifier, and a set of common and optional descriptive properties about that location. Since launching in 2015, the project has gained global coverage by aggregating open data sources, including from hundreds of authoritative government census and statistical organizations. The WOF gazetteer’s focus on populated places (including localities, townships, and neighborhoods), name localization, and internationalization has proven useful for search and reverse geocoding applications. However, until recently, it was hard to draw data on a map. Recent work has made it easier to load the data into common GIS tools via a shapefile distribution, to attribute polygons with “official” concordance IDs useful for choropleth mapping, and to filter features based on population and feature class into zoom buckets to display and label town spots on a slippy map.

Spatial Analysis of Fire-Armed Related Crime in Atlanta
Olalekan Alamoh, Georgia State University
The objective of my research is to employ Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to map and analyze areas in Atlanta with a high incidence of firearm-related crimes. My aim is to improve public safety and increase the overall quality of urban life. I observed a notable concentration of firearm occurrences in distinct urban regions, as indicated by a high Moran's I value. This suggests that these crimes are not randomly spread around but occur in clusters. The results of my research stretched the possibility of implementing focused interventions in these areas of high criminal activity. This can lead to the development of more efficient crime prevention tactics and the creation of safer communities in Atlanta. This research is crucial for law enforcement and legislators who are looking for evidence-based solutions to urban crime.

Ride, Sink, or Swim: Mapping Extreme Floods and the Burdens of Buses in Queens, NYC
Nicholas Dante Lucchetto, Hofstra University
New York City experiences many extreme flooding events. One of the worst was September 2023, when 9.8 inches of rain fell in a single day. For the low-elevation borough of Queens, where 52% of people rely on public transit, the burdens of flooding are worsened by sparse subways and stranded cars. Therefore, buses are a critical mobility and safety tool during a weather emergency in Queens. This study looks at how flooding affects New York City bus performance and infrastructure, by incorporating metrics like bus delay data, precipitation records, and 311 reports. This study helps uncover how—and where—a multi-faceted climate event affects the daily life of Queens residents and how NYC buses keep on rolling amid our climate crisis.

Enhancing Visual Realism in Web-Based 3D Terrain Maps
Ondřej Procházka, Seznam.cz
Web-based 3D terrain maps employ technologies like HTTP/2 and WebGL to generate dynamic perspective views from underlying DEMs and landcover data in real-time, offering an interactive experience within your browser. In this talk, I will discuss some of my recent efforts to upgrade a global web-based 3D terrain map, focusing on achieving enhanced visual realism, improved terrain representation, and better rendering performance.

Animating Maps with Adobe After Effects
Sarah Bell, Esri
Animated map graphics have become a ubiquitous part of media production. Documentaries, advertisements, and even fictional television shows have been using Adobe After Effects to create map animations to visually aid their stories. From flight routes, to tsunami waves, to rotating globes, the possibilities are endless. In this talk, I will share tips that I've learned by turning my static map graphics into animations with Adobe After Effects.

Mapping Light and Shadow on Mount Everest
Carl Churchill, The Wall Street Journal
Mount Everest has developed a mountaineering industry built around summiting the highest peak on earth. This industry has had to adapt to changing climactic conditions on the route, as the glacier that hikers on the southern, or Nepali, route, rely on has been gradually collapsing. As part of a year-long graphics project for The Wall Street Journal, I constructed a 3D model of Everest with open-source tools and combined detailed reporting with simulated physical conditions to portray to our readers how Everest expeditions must race against a melting glacier to reach the top.

Visualizing Change: How Map Design Shapes Our Views on Glacier Retreat 
Fangsheng (Jasper) Zhou, University of Oregon
This presentation explores the emotional and perceptual impacts of 2D versus 3D map designs on viewers' understanding of glacier retreat due to climate change. Utilizing the South Cascade Glacier as a case study, this research examines how different visual representations can influence public perceptions and emotional responses to environmental changes. Through a user study involving a diverse group of participants, the study aims to highlight the effectiveness of map design in communicating complex geographic information and raising awareness about the pressing issue of climate change.

Canyon Cartography
Brandon Plewe, Brigham Young University
Over the years, a great deal of research has been done and dozens of techniques have been developed for portraying the beautiful and rugged landscape of mountains. Much less time has been spent on their counterpart, canyons; especially landscapes that feature rocky cliffs and canyons without mountains, such as the Colorado Plateau in the Southwestern United States. We experimented with existing and new techniques that can be composited to create maps of canyonlands that emphasize their ruggedness and beauty, and help visitors more effectively understand and travel through them.

Introducing Tiled Texture Shading
Leland Brown, Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Lisbon, Portugal
Texture shading is an algorithm to enhance visual detail in canyons, ridges, and structural features of a terrain. But suppose you want a seamless map of a very large area. If you divide the map into tiles and texture shade each one separately, the tiles won't match properly at the edges. Until now, the only solution was to process the entire dataset as a unit, potentially needing more time or memory space than you have available. Now the algorithm has been extended to process tiles individually while taking into account their context in the surrounding map. The result is texture-shaded tiles that fit together seamlessly into a single image. This makes texture shading practical even on datasets of 100,000 x 100,000 pixels or larger.

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.

Native and Indigenous Critical Cartography and Counter-mapping Panel with Elspeth Iralu and Laurel Mei-Singh
Drawing on their research and experience, speakers in this panel will examine how counter-mapping and decolonial initiatives challenge colonial mapping practices and recenter Native and Indigenous communities and methodologies. Speakers will broadly explore the intersections of cartography, Indigenous spatial justice, carceral geography, spaces of resistance, and counter-mapping.

Rectifying a Map of Indian Country
Elspeth Iralu, PhD, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico
In this talk, I consider the legal category of Indian Country and how cartographers’ understanding of what makes up Indian Country influences the maps we imagine possible. Indian Country is a formal, legal term historically used in the United States to refer to all land within the borders of reservations. It has also been used within military operations to refer to “enemy” territory globally. Here, I consider what it might mean to understand Indian Country beyond its finite, legal boundaries to extend to an affective, felt experience of Indigenous presence. How might we represent this cartographically? How might we build on developments in Indigenous geographies to communicate this felt knowledge of place?

The Carceral Geographies of US Militarism
Laurel Mei-Singh, Assistant Professor of Geography & Environment and Asian American Studies, University of Texas at Austin
The climate crisis has advanced the global dialogue about the environmental ravages of war and its impacts on marginalized people. This study of Native Hawaiians confronting the US military on O‘ahu’s contested land expands this critique to examine the environmental justice dimensions of carceral geographies. Carceral geographies involve ongoing partitioning that enforces uneven access to resources by criminalizing lifeways that draw from interdependence with the natural world. At the same time, Hawaiian paradigms premised on human-environment interconnection persist, competing with US territorial domination. As such, the carceral geographies of US militarism regulate and contain placemaking practices that yield viable alternatives to capitalism and war.

Mapping Vitality in Earth Systems
Maggie Camillos, Clancy Wilmott & Alexis Wood, University of California, Berkeley
Understanding the earth as alive is essential to developing the relationship of respect and reciprocity with our environment, which is necessary for long-term human evolution and to deepen our scientific understanding of interconnectivity amongst earth systems. Essential to developing this understanding is both reframing our understanding of vitality itself and developing visualization techniques to communicate this concept when applied to earth systems. Thus, the realm of earth systems science cartography is an important frontier in the development of a living understanding of the earth. In this presentation, I will offer an emergent conceptualization of vitality that incorporates earth systems, and critique traditional earth systems cartography in pursuit of an emergent cartographic technique in line with this definition.

Washington State Through Terrain and Time
Daniel Coe, Washington Geological Survey
From the canyons and coulees of the high desert—to the ice-capped volcanoes of the Cascade Range—to the wild coastline at the edge of the Pacific, Washington State harbors a treasure trove of topographic gems. At the Washington Geological Survey, we tell the story of these landforms through interpretive maps and imagery. In this presentation, we will go on a cartographic tour of the state using high-resolution elevation data as our guide.

Mountains of Evidence: Using Forensic Landscape Photography and GIS to Prosecute Illegal Hunting in the Remote Mountain Landscapes of Canada’s Yukon Territory
Gerry Perrier, Yukon Department of Environment
Big game hunting is an annual activity for many Yukon residents who hunt primarily for subsistence. Non-residents hunt with a licensed professional outfitter, focused more on trophies. Yukon's vast wilderness requires careful wildlife management to sustain hunter harvests due to a growing human population. Regulations dictate eligible species, timing and location of hunting activities. Geographic location plays a crucial role in managing wildlife and regulating hunting. Although most hunters follow the rules, some do not. This presentation presents three illegal hunting cases, illustrating how investigators use field photography, topographic modeling, and cartographic design to prove geographic location in court.

Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Power Generation from Interconnected Solar Arrays in San Juan County, Washington
Matt Sommer, Penn State University
Distributed rooftop solar arrays that are interconnected into the electrical distribution grid, have variable output in space and time which may not match well with demand. Small utilities may not have good methods to analyze when and where generation is happening. Using the interactive visualization capabilities of a Shiny web application based on historical smart meter data, can offer a way to analyze and understand when and where solar panels are providing power to the grid. This application uses the Shiny web framework to implement spatial and temporal filtering on distributed generation data. The data is visualized in the dashboard to show where, when, and how much power is generated, providing a glimpse into the spatial and temporal variability of distributed energy resources.

Taking UCSF’s Health Atlas National
Eric Brelsford & Kelsey Taylor, Stamen Design
Stamen Design recently worked with UC San Francisco to update and expand their Health Atlas. The Health Atlas is an interactive map that gives users ways to compare demographic and socioeconomic data with data about health care and health outcomes, from the state level down to the census tract. The Atlas was originally created to display data about California, but it now covers all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Come hear about how we handled the challenges around displaying granular data at the national level, created supplementary visualizations that help users understand and explore the data, and crafted the cartography that ties it all together, incorporating user feedback along the way.

A Field of Honor Forever: Mapping Flight 93 National Memorial
Alex Fries, U.S. National Park Service
Established in 2002 and first opened in 2015, Flight 93 National Memorial in Somerset County, Pennsylvania honors the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93, one of the four aircraft seized by terrorists during the September 11 attacks and, due to the courageous actions of its passengers and crew, the only plane which did not reach its intended target.  The combination of the memorial’s mission to retell the story of a tragedy that still occupies living memory, and the rather iterative nature of its construction has made this one of the more challenging NPS units to map in recent years. This talk will thus be a brief overview of my role in developing a set of maps for the park’s ongoing project to overhaul some of its interpretive media, including a refreshed Unigrid brochure and a new wayside exhibit. In particular, I will discuss the sort of balancing act that needed to be managed between conveying the story of Flight 93 with both the power and sensitivity it deserves; and the reality of making practical considerations that ensure the maps will remain useful for orientation and storytelling to the widest audience possible—among them being a design decision for the new park map that largely breaks from NPS tradition and may in fact be the first park brochure map to implement the technique in question.

A Land Acknowledgment Map for Northern Utah
Ryan Frazier, Weber State University
This short talk will display the Land Cessation map created for Northern Utah and Weber State University regions. We will address the process that led us to the current map and show a few steps and iterations that we took to arrive at this current version.

Illustrating Ahupuaʻa , the Hawaiian System of Land Stewardship
Rosemary Wardley, National Geographic
Come join as a cartographer makes more of a graphic and less of a map and explore what can be learned from embracing the collaborative process working with Indigenous Hawaiian artists and knowledge holders. Featured in the July National Geographic Special Issue on Indigenous Futures, Ancient Practice, Future Promise is an illustration that looks at the historical and future applications of ahupa'a land divisions.

Mushing and Mapping: Finding the Ancient Cedars of the Boundary Waters
Jake Steinberg, Minnesota Star Tribune
News cartographers don't often get out into the field. But in February, the Minnesota Star Tribune sent me on a 5-day dogsled journey into the Boundary Waters to find what may be the oldest tree in the state—a cedar said to be over a thousand years old. In this talk, I will discuss how this journey informed my map design, the nuances of spelling Indigenous place names, adapting historical maps into a pastiche style, and breaking down organizational silos to make a cross-departmental project like this happen.

Where Rivers, Mountains and People Meet
Jeff Clark, Clark Geomatics
A spectacular route from Vancouver to Pemberton links the Pacific Ocean to the snowy peaks of the Coastal Mountains in SW British Columbia. Scenic Highway 99 clings to the eastern slope of Howe Sound, a glacier-carved fiord, through Squamish and north alongside the Cheakamus River as it makes its way past Whistler to Pemberton. The Lil’wat, one of the First Peoples of the Sea to Sky, aptly refer to their home as the place “where rivers, mountains and people meet.” This talk will cover my cartographic decisions, tools, techniques and data used to create the terrain, and how I incorporated First Nations place names to recognize the long indigenous presence in the area to produce this geographically expressive map – The Essential Geography of the Sea To Sky.

Creating a Digital, Indigenous Walking Tour of UW-Madison: Reflections on Collaboration, Justice, and Place
Gareth Baldrica-Franklin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Mapping Teejop is a digital walking tour centered on Indigenous history and presence on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. This presentation discusses the multi-layed process of creating Mapping Teejop, particularly the importance of collaboration and flexibility with students and community members. Walking tours can evoke a more intimate connection to place, and this project is situated without our attempts to reinforce the position of campus as an Indigenous place.

Wairarapa Glistening Water: Reflections on a Co-Designed Spatial Narrative Virtual Reality (VR) App
Mairead de Roiste, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington
Kahungunu ki Wairarapa and the SpatialThink Lab at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington co-designed and co-created a simple spatial VR (Virtual Reality) application for a unique storytelling experience for five wetlands in the Wairarapa in Aotearoa New Zealand. We use ambisonic sound, 360-degree video, landscape representation, and recorded narratives composed by Kahungunu to tell the korero (stories) of these wetlands.
This presentation will detail the collaborative underpinnings of the project and discuss the decisions and compromises made to represent the wetlands while following the needs and values of the iwi (tribe).

Raster-to-Vector Heat Maps: Multiscale Visualization Approach to Mapping and Interacting with Big Geospatial Data
Yanbing Chen, University of Wisconsin - Madison
This project is an ongoing project that aims to create a multiscale visualization approach for rendering big geospatial data on the web. By seamlessly transitioning between raster and vector heat maps based on zoom level, the project will enhance the utility and performance of interactive web maps. Using tools like Datamaps, Tippecanoe, and MapboxGL JS, the project will develop a prototype to evaluate optimal transition points and visual consistency techniques. This approach will make geospatial data more accessible and usable, benefiting fields such as urban planning, transportation analysis, and environmental science.

Who Owns Massachusetts?: A New Interactive Map or Identifying Institutional Ownership
Eric Huntley, Asya Aizman, & Milan Chuttani, MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Institutional ownership of residential properties is a matter of urgent concern, but one that is obfuscated by the difficulty of identifying shared ownership given the common practice of creating a different LLC for each property. This presents, among other things, a data science problem, in that identifying the scale of shared ownership requires entity resolution approaches that are dependent on access to multiple large datasets. We will present a new interactive map, Who Owns Massachusetts, that attempts to make discover of institutional ownership possible throughout the Commonwealth. We will introduce the tool's functionality, novel datasets we are making available in building the tool, and future directions for development and research.

All the Joys of Mapping (and Seeing!) the Total Solar Eclipse of 2024
K.K. Rebecca Lai, William B. Davis & Josh Katz, The New York Times
The total solar eclipse of 2024 captured the attention of millions as it crossed North America on April 8, 2024. To help readers get the best experience possible, our team created a cloud forecast map to help readers find the best spots. We will share our design and development process, the lovely reader feedback we got and our own experience of seeing a total solar eclipse for the first time. On eclipse day, we also published a video of satellite imagery showing the shadow of the moon as it passed across the Earth.

Unidrome: Mapping Every Aerodrome Worldwide with Cloud Native Data
Alex Polvi, Barbless Maps
Building on our backcountry aviation mapping journey, the Unidrome project expands to a global scale, unifying all known open datasets to map known place to land an airplane in the world. We'll explore the integration of cloud native data, geospatial analysis, and aviation software, highlighting the innovative methods and challenges encountered. This project also serves as a case study for constructing and organizing cloud-native geospatial data, offering insights and best practices for similar large-scale endeavors.

A Complicated Wilderness: Mapping Guadalupe Mountains National Park
Becca Holdhusen, U.S. National Park Service
Guadalupe Mountains encompasses complex cultural narratives that extend well beyond the park boundary. In this talk, I provide background about the park’s geology, ecology, and cultural history and the ways these pieces have shaped the story of a lesser known park. I review a series of 3D and planimetric maps I made for the park and invite the audience to speculate about ways to include interpretive clues that would give map readers a deeper understanding of the cultural context of the park.

Exploring Intra-Annual Variations in Urban Effects on Precipitation in the Atlanta, GA, USA Region
Olamiposi Fagunloye, Georgia State University
This study investigates the intra-annual variations in urban effects on precipitation in the rapidly urbanizing Atlanta, GA region. By analyzing over two decades of precipitation data from 70 stations, along with land cover, imperviousness, and atmospheric reanalysis data, the research aims to determine the spatial variability and seasonal differences in urban impacts on precipitation totals, frequency, and intensity. Geostatistical techniques like kriging will generate high-resolution precipitation surfaces, while correlation analyses will assess the relationship between upwind urban land and precipitation characteristics. The findings will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of urbanization's influence on precipitation patterns, informing urban planning and water resource management strategies.

Visualizing a Contemporary Humanitarian Crisis: Exploratory Mapping of Migrant Deaths from the Unstructured Text of Newspaper Accounts
Rachel Daniell, Pratt School of Information & Molly Miranker, Texas State University
How might we visualize a humanitarian crisis when available geospatial data is limited? We navigate this question in our ongoing research on deaths of migrating persons along the US-Mexico border, where thousands have perished but documentation has been limited in scope and form. Our current work explores mapping unstructured text data from Texas newspapers to further document places where human remains have been found -- seeking to map approximate coordinates and qualitative terms like “near the county road” and “along the river.” We will present cartographic expressions of these data and discuss with the audience potential ways to map qualitative data on humanitarian crises and what such maps might raise, recenter, and uncover.

Visualizing Change Over Time on the Web
Jeremy Bartley, Esri
There are various ways to visualize how to visualize how spatial data changes over time in both print and online cartography. This session provides an overview of 10 different approaches to visualizing change over time on the web. We will cover both cartographic styles that focus on time, the role of animation, and newer techniques such as geo-referenced streaming high-definition videos that show changes on the earth over time in a rich and interactive way. Each method will be described with examples showing scenarios when each type of visualization works well and when it struggles.

Close: an Interactive, Multi-Modal Travel Time Map
Nathaniel Henry, Henry Spatial Analysis
Close (https://close.city/) is an interactive web map showing travel times to nearby amenities via walking, biking, and public transit across every block in the United States. This presentation describes how Close visualizes travel times from 8 million city blocks to 4 million destinations using publicly-available data sources and tools, with an emphasis on newly-released data from the Overture Maps project. Common public reactions, incorporating crowdsourced feedback, and extensions of Close will also be covered.

Navigating Election Night: Behind the Scenes of Visualizing 2024 Election Results
Clare Trainor, Reuters
Not all news coverage is breaking news. Some events happen every year, every two years, or even every 4 years, like the U.S. presidential election. This talk breaks down how the Reuters Graphics team built a component-based system to visualize results for the 2024 election. I will explain the challenges of working with real-time election data, our process for combining results with geographic data, the design hurdles we faced, plus how we tested our components to ensure accurate results are shown on election night to our readers.

High-Resolution Elevation Tiles for Enhanced Terrain Rendering
Lee France & Tony Cannistra, onX Maps
3D mapping is now common across many applications and industries, yet a high-resolution 3D Map tailored to outdoor enthusiasts has been lacking. onX maps, a company focused on mapping our natural spaces, has attempted to fill that void by developing highly detailed elevation tiles built from lidar resolution data. These new elevation tiles are allowing us to render landscapes in incredible 3D detail helping users of these maps better understand and interpret crucial terrain features. In this talk we’ll dive into why we tackled this major challenge, how we did it and take a look at some of the beautiful map products resulting from this incredible elevation data.

Maps as Poetry
Richard Bohannon, Metro State University—Saint Paul
Maps tell a story, but tell it slant. While they have long been used as narrative aids (such as in Esri’s Story Maps), most maps do not have a linear, narrative structure and the story-telling aspect of mapping is often metaphorical – maps have agendas and perspectives. This paper proposes a complementary, alternative metaphor -- maps as poetry – using historic and contemporary maps to show how poetry might be a helpful model for the work of maps and the map-making process. Both poetry and maps are sparing and restrained – poetry in its use of language, maps in their selections from the landscape. Both also use rhythm and balance (aural for poems, visual for maps) to evoke a particular mood, feeling or tenor. Poetry is a particularly useful metaphor because, like most maps, it can be non-linear, conveying ideas through images without walking the audience directly through their meaning.

Revitalization of a University Building Interior: Abstracting Geographies Through Cartographic Public Art Installations
Cynthia Brewer, Penn State Geography
Public art fits within a broader discourse of university renovation, undertaken to attract and retain students, enhancing the appearance and functionality of campus environments. We describe cartographically inspired floor and wall designs for a renovated space within the Department of Geography at Penn State. Hallway floor designs used pentagonal tiles, creating a coarse rasterization of local physical features and historical movement paths. Back-lit wall panels have a global emphasis. High-contrast shapes were chosen from six continents. They show human (building footprints, parcels, and indigenous land claims) and physical patterns (major rivers, lagoons, and ice). A local panel shows the ridge-and-valley terrain of central Pennsylvania.

The Cartographic Art of the Opposite of Bespoke
Nicholas Bauch, Esri
Pixel-perfect detailing, custom tracing, nudging hex codes: all marks of the artistic precision we adore in powerful cartographic design. But how might we maintain adherence to strong spatial storytelling when creating a large number of maps for an audience who, on average, won’t spend more than 8 seconds reading them? Frequently absent of legends and even text, geographical representation goes to new places when designing maps “at scale.” From the perspective of MapX—the carto team for Esri’s public-facing website—I outline challenges, and share design system strategies that help answer the question: “how to show the beauty and elucidative capacity of cartography when there are nearly 2,500 web pages calling for new, cutting-edge maps?

Drawing Participation: A Real-Time, Peer-to-Peer Tool for Participatory Planning and Design
Carlos Sandoval Olascoaga, Northeastern University
Drawing Participation (DP) was created to increase accessibility and to provide a scalable and open platform for shared planning and design. DP is a peer-to-peer, collaborative Geospatial Computing System tool that integrates drawing, mapping, spatial analysis, version-control, and algorithms for design synthesis. Drawing Participation is a model for collective and collaborative planning methods and interfaces that enable large groups of people to work together in ill-defined design problems. In this presentation we will present, first, the conceptual and technical background of DP, second, the technical implementations of the tool, and third, a case study of the implementation of the tool to collaboratively develop parcel maps in informal settlements in Sub-Saharan Africa.

A Pop-Up Book: Visualizing the Spatial Sensitivity Analysis
Seda Salap-Ayca, Brown University; Zhu Gaocanyue, Emma Hogarth & Georgia Rhodes, Rhode Island School of Design
Sensitivity analysis plays a crucial role in deepening our understanding of models and facilitating clearer communication of their results by accounting for variations in output and their dependency on inputs. When applied spatially, sensitivity analysis generates individual maps for the effects of each input as well as for their interactions. However, the challenge lies in simplifying the visual presentation of spatial sensitivity results. This project is a fusion of art and science designed to address this multidimensional visualization challenge by leveraging a pop-up structure to convey mapping information. The first layer of the book cover features graticules representing latitudes and longitudes, providing a foundational framework. The second layer, constituting the main body of the map, utilizes vibrant color zones to distinguish between regions, while blank spaces denote missing data. These colors, produced through a marbling technique, symbolize the intricate relationship between input and output in spatial models, illustrating how variations in input can yield diverse outputs. The third layer employs Turkish map folding, incorporating paper mechanisms shaped like collapsible houses, which cleverly obscure internal information, necessitating audience interaction to unveil insights. This folding structure transforms the map from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, adding depth and complexity while retaining visual appeal. By integrating artful design with scientific rigor, this project offers a novel approach to conveying spatial sensitivity analysis results, making them more accessible and engaging to a wider audience.

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.

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.

Atlas in a Day: Imagining a Black Counter-Atlas of Abolition
Kela Caldwell, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Building on critical cartographies of African American freedom struggles (Alderman et al, 2001), I explore the political potentials of producing a Black counter-atlas of racial violence in an effort to challenge and re-historicize how anti-black violence is defined and categorized. In this paper, I draw on participant surveys, mapping creations, and my reflections from a Design Challenge workshop hosted by the UW–Madison Cartography Lab to explore visualizing and re-historicizing anti-black violence through atlas co-creation. Here, I share lessons from the Design Challenge as an opportunity to imagine what futurities might emerge from producing and placing cartographic visualizations of abolition in relationship with each other.

Mapping the Future of Food in Climate Change With VACS Earth Genome
Caroline Carter & Kelsey Taylor, Stamen Design
In support of the US Department of State’s Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS) initiative, Stamen Design teamed up with Earth Genome to create VACS Explorer, an interactive cartographic tool that allows users to compare the modeled viability of different crops in Africa in 2050 depending on which UN climate change scenario unfolds. Climate change will test agriculture practices across the globe in ways humans can’t fully predict. We built the VACS Explorer in attempts to make these agricultural decisions more data-driven. Hear how we use features like small multiples, supplementary sand & soil and nutrition data, a navigable minimap, and more to build out this experience for all users.

In the Hot Seat: Acquiring Kernel Density Heat Map Design Guidance Through Delphi and Survey Methods
Lauren McKinney-Wise, Portland State University
Kernel density heat maps have emerged as a new, popular thematic map type. Yet, unlike other thematic map types, little if any published guidance exists for effective heat map design. This is significant because maps are highly persuasive objects that are often utilized to communicate important information. To address this literature gap, I conducted a Delphi experiment with cartographic experts to gather heat map design guidance and then tested the effectiveness of the expert-informed heat map design guidance among public reference librarians in the US using an online survey. This is a shortened version of my master's thesis presentation.

Cheap and Pricey: NPR Leveraged Free Tools To Build and Host Our Own Slippy Maps. Was It Worth It?
Daniel Wood, NPR
This year, NPR published an extremely detailed tool to help gardeners around the country understand the updated USDA plant hardiness zone map. To do this, we built our own slippy maps, utilizing all free and open-source tools: Maplibre GL JS, Protomaps, OpenMapTiles, Tilezen, OSM data, and more. The final product was so cool. It is extremely cheap (in $) and extremely costly (in time, if you're a n00b like me). Come and weigh the costs and benefits together. You will learn about the recent (re)explosion of open source tools for making detailed, performant, and pretty maps online, how ChatGPT helped me understand documentation I didn't want to read, and what I'd do differently next time.

Creating a 3D Map of the Haleakalā Volcano on Mauii
Jim Eynard, U.S. National Park Service
The summit in Haleakalā National Park, at 10,023 feet (3,055m) , is the tallest peak on the island of Maui in Hawaii. This map uses high resolution aerial imagery and elevation data in a 3D perspective view to show the the dramatic summit area including the road to the top, the visitor centers, viewpoints, and the many trails in the nearly 7 mile wide steep sided depression, often referred to as a crater.

Creating Beautiful Open-Source Interactive Maps With R and D3
Henry Beimers, NORC at the University of Chicago
Some of the major difficulties in web mapping come from translating your tabular data into the right format for visualization. With the r2d3 R package, creating beautiful interactive online maps using the JavaScript D3 library is just another part of your data processing workflow in R. This talk will discuss how to use R to interface with JavaScript D3 through the r2d3 package to create beautiful interactive maps for the web, R Markdown reports, or Shiny applications in an efficient and fully open source process.

Natural Scene Designer Pro 8
Tom Patterson, US National Park Service (retired)
Natural Scene Designer 8, due for release this autumn for Mac and Windows, has new features useful to cartographers, including: Download Terrain Models – The following DEMs are available through a map interface: GMTED, SRTM, ALOS, Copernicus, Aster, MERIT, ArcticDEM, and REMA. Resolutions range from 1 to 1,000 meters. NAIP Import – Automatically download, unzip, reproject, resample, and overlay high-resolution aerial images on the current DEM. Texture Shade Blending – Add texture shading to 3D scenes, plan oblique relief, and shaded relief. You can control the amount and characteristics of texture shading, and where it occurs on a terrain.

Displacement Vulnerability and Mitigation Tool
Abigail Fleming, University of Miami
The Environmental Justice Clinic (“EJC”) and the Frost Institute for Data Science & Computing at the University of Miami developed the Displacement Vulnerability and Mitigation Tool (“DVMT”), a three-part, web-based tool that uses data analytics to forecast the risk of displacement a proposed development may cause and equip community stakeholders with research-informed mitigation strategies.

Demystifying Cloud Native Geospatial For Working With Data At Scale
William Lyon, Wherobots
As data volumes continue to grow in the geospatial world tooling and data formats from the big data ecosystem are being applied to the geospatial world. This enables more distribution and new types of data analysis, yet can be frustrating when trying to integrate with some GIS workflows. In this talk, we'll examine why cloud-native data formats for geospatial are becoming popular and how to work with them by looking at GeoParquet, STAC, Cloud Optimized GeoTiffs, PMTiles, and Apache Sedona.

How to Improve Your GIS to Graphic Design Workflow
Julia Olson and Sarah Bell, Esri
Many cartographers start their maps in a GIS before exporting into a graphic design program. ArcGIS Maps for Adobe Creative Cloud was designed with these mappers in mind. We will share new capabilities as we demonstrate how we created our Pacific Northwest-based map gallery poster using the ArcGIS Pro-to-Adobe Illustrator workflow. Our demo will incorporate Maps for Adobe features, like automatic symbol replacement, automated symbol library creation, well-organized data visualization, vector tile basemaps, and more!

Applying Indigenous Research and Data Practices Panel with Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, Ph.D. and Annita Hetoevehotohke'e Lucchesi
This panel will explore the importance of integrating Indigenous knowledge and data practices into cartography. Speakers will discuss how modern cartographic practices can improve to support Indigenous communities and how considerations for decolonizing cartographic practices help address colonial power dynamics and violence perpetuated via maps. This panel will broadly focus on issues related to data violence, data sovereignty, ethical and equitable collaboration and research, and Indigenous research practices and knowledge.


A Recipe for Ethical Geographic Work with Indigenous Communities
Niiyokamigaabaw Deondre Smiles, Ph.D. (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe), Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada
This talk approaches methods and guidelines for decolonial geographic research through a lens of conducting ethical, respectful research with Indigenous communities in human and physical geography, and across the quantitative-qualitative spectrum. Using a historical and contemporary discussion of the entanglement of the discipline of Geography with colonial and imperial structures, along with an overview of potential steps that researchers should bear in mind when engaging with Indigenous communities in research endeavors, this talk works to answer the key questions: What comprises decolonial research? How can researchers in Geography work towards accomplishing it in a way that is attentive to the needs of communities they work with and within, while meeting their own research objectives? Special attention is paid to the unique needs of students and early career scholars.

Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Cartography for Self-Determination and Indigenous Wellbeing
Annita Hetoevehotohke'e Lucchesi
This presentation explores the intersections of data sovereignty and Indigenous self-determination, and how applying Indigenous data sovereignty principles to cartography can advance Indigenous self-determination and wellbeing. Cartography is often imagined as a centuries-long harmful, settler-imposed practice enabling genocide and land removal; what if we reimagined it as a practice that facilitated Indigenous land (re)connection, lifeways, safety, and healing? In this presentation, Lucchesi will offer her experiences exploring that question as a Cheyenne geographer.

Building the Definitive Draft for River Craft: The John Day Boater's Guide
Gabriel Rousseau & Monic Morin, Bureau of Land Management
The Bureau of Land Management recently published a comprehensive boater's guide for The John Day River. The John Day drains nearly 8,100 square miles of central and northeast Oregon. It is one of the nation’s longest undammed rivers, 147.5 miles of which were designated as a Wild & Scenic River by Congress in 1988. This talk will take you through the three-year process of field work, data collection, content writing, layout & design, and revision. This guide maps 185 river miles at 1 inch to 1/2 mile and is an invaluable resource for education, navigation, safety, and maintaining a sustainable ecosystem.

Thematic Mapping in Augmented Reality: Challenges and Opportunities
David Retchless, Texas A&M University at Galveston
Augmented reality (AR) platforms are increasingly popular in cartographic research and practice, especially for orientation and navigation. However, the potential of AR techniques for thematic mapping remains underexplored. AR tools: 1) share with thematic mapping an emphasis on making the invisible, visible; but 2) differ from thematic maps in design-relevant ways, including perspective and scale/extent. Drawing on my experience developing thematic maps and AR tools for coastal flooding, I consider challenges and opportunities associated with translating design principles for thematic mapping to the AR context, with a focus on abstraction and prominence of point symbols (but also encompassing other feature types, basemaps, and marginalia).

Mapping the Construction of the Qosh Tepa Canal in Northern Afghanistan
Danielle Henry, BlackSky
The Qosh Tepa Canal is a planned 285km canal diverting water from the Amu Darya River into northern Afghanistan for irrigation, with the goal of making Afghanistan food independent. Roughly 100km of the canal are complete, and progress continues under the Taliban government. BlackSky has been closely monitoring the progress of the canal’s construction using a combination of custom-tasked BlackSky imagery, Sentinel-2 data, commercial satellite imagery, and open-source research. BlackSky’s multifaceted approach to monitoring and mapping the canal has produced novel insights about the canal’s construction, geopolitical impact, and long-term viability.

Coloring Outside of the Lines: Sketch Mapping Fear, Safety, and Community for LGBTQ+ Students Amidst Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation
Natalie Correa, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Over 500 state-level bills were introduced in the US that negatively targeted members in the LGBTQ+ community in 2023. I sought to investigate how introduced and passed legislation impacted how college students think about space. I used sketch mapping and interviews to gather student perceptions of fear, safety, and community within the US. The use of sketch mapping provided direct linkages between where students perceived these characteristics and why they perceived them. I then aggregated the results in ArcGIS Pro to create synthesized maps that showed the areas of fear, safety, and community. My research offers insight on using sketch mapping on a large scale in addition to using sketch mapping to understand perceived realities.

City as Museum: Reimagining Urban Wayfinding and Storytelling
Gurpreet Kaur
The talk explores the concept of a city as a living museum, where each landmark tells a story, turning urban landscapes into engaging narratives that enhance wayfinding. It will showcase how this idea can transform urban exploration, guiding visitors and residents through the city's rich historical and cultural stories via its unique landmarks. An example use case will highlight how users can engage with the city’s stories, making each landmark a portal to the past and a navigation guide in the present.

Globes – an App for the Apple Vision Pro
Evan Thornberry, David Rumsey & Niles Dorn, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries; 
Bernie Jenny, Dilpreet Singh & Kadek Satriadi, Monash University, Melbourne
Globes is a new app for the Apple Vision Pro headset that shows globes at the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford Libraries. Virtual globes are rendered with unprecedented visual clarity and detail, and they can be freely scaled and positioned. This presentation will demonstrate the features of the Globes app and discuss its development. Additionally, we will explore future applications of augmented reality for visualizing maps and globes, and showcase how tangible globes can be augmented with virtual visualizations.

Creating Thematic Maps with the Help of Generative AI
Kristian Ekenes, Esri
Since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT nearly two years ago, the number of artificial intelligence assistants has exploded in software applications in almost every industry. We'll explore the role generative AI assistants play in creating thematic maps from an end user's natural language. I’ll describe Esri’s approach in building an AI mapping assistant for ArcGIS Online and summarize findings discovered from user testing, research, and the implications it has on mapping workflows moving forward.

Leveraging a Living Atlas of the World
Emily Meriam, Esri
In 2014 Esri’s ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World (LAW) debuted as a community GIS that allowed for sharing across the world, a new kind of “living atlas” of geographic information. The LAW was designed to provide meaningful access to GIS content openly shared and to be an online catalog of authoritative and best available geographic information from individual organizations, partners, and the global GIS community. In this presentation learn how to use this vast collection of geospatial information for cartographic purposes. The maps shown will be from Esri’s founder Jack Dangermond’s first authored book called The Power of Where.

The Past, Present, and Future of Stamen Maps
Alan McConchie, Stamen Design
A decade ago, Stamen Design launched the Toner, Terrain, and Watercolor map styles built on OpenStreetMap data, which soon became an essential part of the open source mapping ecosystem. Last year we partnered with Stadia Maps to create all new versions of the Toner and Terrain maps, based on a modern mapping stack of vector tiles to keep them running for the next generation. In this presentation, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges of redesigning familiar map styles using a totally new set of tools, while still staying true to the well-loved aesthetics of the original maps.

A User Study of Relief Inversion and a Benefit of Sky Models
Patrick Kennelly, Long Island University; Izabela Gołębiowska, Izabela Karsznia & Katarzyna Borczon, University of Warsaw
Relief inversion, the perception that valleys are ridges and vice versa, can occur with shaded relief maps using southern illumination. While previous user studies have documented this effect and looked at lighting directions to avoid, we study whether inversion can be eliminated using multidirectional sky models. 352 participants were asked to look at shaded relief maps and identify valleys and ridges, compare elevation of points, identify elevation change of slopes, and associate elevation profiles. Results with shaded relief maps illuminated from 1) one direction from NNW 2) sky models from NNW or 3) sky models from SSW show no statistically significant difference, while 4) one direction from SSW led to significantly worse accuracy. Additionally, no difference in response time may indicate users make no attempt to mentally re-invert relief.

Bringing Transparency to Freelance Mapmaking
Daniel Huffman, somethingaboutmaps
Freelancing mapping can be a lonely business. Without regular insight into our peers, we're left wondering if we're making the right business decisions. Should I make everyone sign a contract? Should I charge a flat rate or hourly? And the biggest one: how much should I charge my clients? It's easy to be uncertain about what we're doing if we don't know what's typical for our peers. Since 2018, Daniel Huffman & Aly Ollivierre have been conducting a biennial survey of freelance cartographers in order to bring transparency to the business, and help all of us thrive. In this presentation, we'll have a look at some of the results of the last several years, both the expected and the surprising.

Discussing Current Limits and Future Opportunities in Mobile Map Design
Lily Houtman, Penn State University
Designing maps for mobile devices is increasingly important in our modern work. Following a preliminary study focused on mobile thematic maps in the context of data journalism, I highlight a few key limitations in this area of research: types of interactivity, time constraints, simultaneous design, and ability to conduct user testing. In addition to presenting conclusions from my previous work, I describe potential avenues for future work on the same subject. I plan to make audience engagement a significant portion of my talk, gaining knowledge from currently practicing data journalists and others who work on mobile thematic maps to help inform my future research questions.

Digital Diary: Writing Down Your Notes and Your Process
Rachel Stevenson, Colorado - Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management 
When writing code, one can often add comments about their process as they write their script or program.
When developing a map product, there lacks this inability to track comments throughout the map-making process.
While yes, task tracking exists in ArcGIS Pro. I find it lacks the ability capture my thought process.
One of my best practices is to track my process through details notes.
In this presentation, I'll share with you how I track my map-making process and why you should consider making this practice apart of your workflow.

Defining a Brand of Cartography
Lee France, onX Maps
In late 2022, onX maps, a company focused on mapping recreational pursuits for millions of outdoor enthusiasts, decided to invest big into cartography. They formed a team dedicated to defining the look and feel of their foundational product: the map. In this talk we'll dive into that team's journey to discovering what it means to define a brand of cartography, and how to anchor around that brand to create beautiful map designs that are highly functional and tailored to the needs of specific user groups.

Are You Mappier than a 5th Grader?
Dave McLaughlin, Penn State University
Building on a Career Day presentation about the life of a Geospatial Data Visualization Software Engineer, I developed and facilitated a 90-minute mapping workshop for thirty-five fifth graders. Working with colored pencils and paper, and using Beescape (beescape.psu.edu) as the model, we started with some creative cartography, learned how to encode research data from biologists onto our maps, then investigated the landscape to determine the most beneficial areas for pollinators. See photos from the session, and hear about the process and lessons learned from putting together a reusable lesson plan to inspire the next generation of cartographers.

Evaluating Beescape NexGen
Anthony Robinson, Lily Houtman, Dave McLaughlin & Christina Grozinger, The Pennsylvania State University
Beescape NexGen makes it possible to visualize pollinator health metrics across landscapes. As part of an iterative user-centered design process, we evaluated a Beescape prototype and found many areas for improvement. This work led to a comprehensive re-design. In this talk we report results from a recent usability and utility evaluation with beekeepers and the re-designed Beescape NexGen. Our findings make clear that our iterative design process has benefited its usability and utility, and we have clear directions now for how to support its continued evolution.

How to Write a Cartography Tutorial
Heather Smith, Esri
I’ve been writing cartography tutorials at Esri for almost six years. I’d like to share some of the methods, tricks, and principles that I’ve learned and employed over that time, including:
1) How to keep a tutorial short without sacrificing learning objectives.
2) How to go beyond button-clicking and explain how to make decisions.
3) How cartography skills translate to writing skills. (How becoming a better writer made me a better cartographer and vice versa.)

Cartography as Spatial Information Practices
Jack Swab, University of Kentucky
Definitions of cartography typically revolve around the construction and study of visual representations of geographic phenomena. In this presentation, I add to this definition by advancing the idea of cartography as the study of spatial information practices. Understanding how individuals find, evaluate, and use maps (and other forms of spatial information) is critical to advancing both the construction and study of maps. Although aspects of a spatial information practice exist in cartography currently—such as UI/UX or wayfinding research—by more readily centering a pluralistic view of spatial information practices we can expand cartography beyond the study of the visual.

Changes You Can Make to Your Workflows to Make More Accessible Maps
Vanessa Knoppke-Wetzel, GreenInfo Network
At GreenInfo Network, we have spent time in the last few years making changes to our interactive production workflows to improve accessibility in our web products, and we also continue to create accessible print maps for our clients and partners. I will share some of what we have learned about accessibility design for the web from the last few years, as well as share out tips and tricks from our experience with print products as well.

Creating an Organizational Cartography Guide
Gray McKenna, Washington State Department of Natural Resources
The National Audubon Society is a hemisphere-wide conservation organization that is known for its strong visual identity. Many Audubon employees are GIS users who regularly produce maps for outreach, planning, and advocacy. However, until recently, there were no Audubon-specific resources for designing maps. To address this need, we created a Cartography Guide using ArcGIS Hub. This guide empowers users of all skill levels to create high-quality, accessible maps that integrate Audubon’s visual identity. This presentation will cover how we created this guide to be responsive to our users’ wide range of needs, and the impact this guide has had on Audubon’s cartographic communications.

A Retrospective on a Career in Museum Mapping and GIS
Daniel Cole, Smithsonian Institution
For the past 39 years, I have served as the Smithsonian's cartographer. I started working with the Anthropology department at NMNH, researching, designing and creating maps for the Handbook of North American Indians and related work. In 1990-91, I moved to serving the entire Smithsonian for building GIS at the Institution while also providing cartographic work for any staff needing it for their publications and work in science, art, and history. Since 1999, I have also been involved with exhibits’ staff as well having contributed maps and geospatial data displays for over 20 exhibits in 7 museums, the Folklife Festival, SI Archives, and SITES. This presentation will review my past and present work until my retirement in December 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.

Untangling Rhode Island’s Forest Habitat: Interactive Mapping at the Confluence of Art and Cartography
Quinn Cowing, Brown University
In designing a final project for my cartography course, I scoured journals and grew enamored with embroidered maps. Specifically, I was inspired by colcha embroidered maps from the San Luis Valley. These maps weave geography with cultural sights and rich history to make accurate representations of local areas. While these artworks heighten the cultural significance of maps, I wanted my embroidery to elevate map interactivity. Therefore, I embroidered the different layers of my map of Rhode Island forest types on separate sheets of tulle. The map viewer is thus able to interact with the map by selecting which layers they would like to view. This work ultimately melds art and cartography to provide an exciting aspect of user interaction.

Teaching Atlas Project Management: Lessons and Reflections
P. William Limpisathian & Alicia Adelle Iverson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In the dynamic landscape of cartographic education and project management, how do we effectively prepare students for the multifaceted demands of modern map production? Beyond mastering cartographic techniques, students must also acquire the skills to take ownership, manage concurrent tasks, and collaborate seamlessly—a blend of competencies often overlooked in traditional cartographic curricula. This talk reflects on the challenges and insights from developing and teaching an exploratory atlas production and project management course. Drawing from our in-class experiences, we explore strategies that bridge the curricular gap between cartographic excellence and effective project management. Our discussion encompasses practical tips, pitfalls to avoid, and successful approaches to modeling and managing a complex atlas project in the confines of a classroom.

Understanding Lhasa through Declassified Spy Satellite Images
Tsering Shawa, Princeton University
Lhasa is the spiritual and political center of Tibet. It is believed that in around 633 AD Tibetan emperor Songtsen Gampo moved his capital from the Yarlung valley to Lhasa. Before it became the capital of Tibet, it was a desolate and swampy valley. Today Lhasa is one of the largest and most vibrant cities in Tibet. In this talk I will use declassified spy satellite images and maps to understand the extent of old Lhasa and identify important historical sites that do not exist now.

Where Did They Go? Mapping Out-Migration From Mammoth Cave National Park, 1920-1940
Collins Eke
The 52,830-acre Mammoth Cave National Park, located in the karst region of south-central Kentucky, was formally established in July of 1941, culminating a nearly three-decade process of park creation that displaced several thousands of residents of the proposed park area. Based on a sample taken from the 1920 U.S. Census, the residents’ migration destinations in the 1930 and 1940 censuses were mapped in a geographic information system. The data collected was represented through chloropleth maps and graduated circle maps. Maps were also constructed to identify destinations of specific sociodemographic subgroups of migrants — Black, White, homeowners, and renters.

Mapping Archaeology and Landscape in the Mongolian Altai Mountains: Transitions in Cartography from 1994 to 2010
James Meacham, University of Oregon
The high valleys of the Altai Mountains of Mongolia contain some of the richest concentrations of rock art and ancient monuments in North Asia. Starting in 1994, an international team assembled to study these complexes. During a 16-year period of annual field work, rapid advances in available geospatial base data and mapping technology allowed the team’s cartographers to radically improve the mapping of the region’s landscape and archaeology. This presentation covers the evolution of the maps and data visualizations from the research, which ultimately contributed to the complexes’ designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Mapping Vulnerabilities: Projected Extreme Heat Risk for Southern Mobile Home Residents
Laura Diaz-Villaquiran, Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance
Extreme heat is the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States, and Southern communities are particularly vulnerable to it. This research examines the geospatial relationship between projected heat increases in the U.S. South and the prevalence of mobile housing units. Preliminary findings indicate that counties in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi are highly vulnerable. Mobile home residents, who often face concentrated disadvantages such as high energy costs, low incomes, and rural isolation are particularly at risk. This research highlights the need for targeted interventions to leverage hazard resiliency and energy efficiency in these communities.

Mount St. Helens Historic Topography Project
Joe Bard, U.S. Geological Survey
The eruption of Mt. St. Helens on May 18, 1980, dramatically changed the mountain and the areas adjacent to the volcano. Since the eruption, the U.S. Geological Survey Cascades Volcano Observatory (CVO) has been documenting the topographic changes of the volcano to build a catalog of elevation datasets. Recently, this work has focused on developing DEMs from historic topographic maps. In 2022, CVO formed a co-op with the Portland Community College GIS program to engage students in this effort. In this talk, we will detail the project, our progress to date, and hear from students who have co-authored these products.

Challenging White Innocence Through an Atlas of US National Landmarks
Alethea Steingisser, Erik Steiner, Laura Pulido, Sophia Ford & Jenna Witzleben, University of Oregon
The InfoGraphics Lab is working on a new atlas – Monumental Denial: U.S. Cultural Memory and White Innocence – that explores how the more than 2,400 United States National Historic Landmarks (NHL) systematize and reflect embedded cultural narratives of white supremacy and colonialization. Through maps, data graphics, photographs, and topical essays, the atlas reveals how NHLs reinforce white innocence and deny the cultural memory of marginalized people. From the official site nomination materials to the formal public messaging at the sites, more than 90% of NHLs fail to acknowledge the racially-based events, people, and processes that are key to understanding the importance of the sites in the context of U.S. history.

Making Maps More Accessible at the U.S. National Park Service
Jake Coolidge, U.S. National Park Service / Colorado State University
As a consensus around best practices for accessible interactive maps emerges, it’s up to cartographers like myself, working with the US National Park Service, to apply these best practices. I’ll review the guidance we followed, how we tested our current maps for accessibility, made plans to address numerous issues, and began the process of remediating existing maps. This long-overdue work remains in the initial stages and is ongoing. I aim to emphasize that no matter how large and daunting the task may seem, it is possible to build partnerships and make real progress toward maps that work better for everyone.

The Junk Consortium: Cartography and World-Building
Jeffrey Linn, Conspiracy of Cartographers
As part of the Junk Consortium, I collaborated with faculty to teach world-building to students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. The Consortium is a group of 15 universities, led by production designer Alex McDowell, imagining far-future societies built on the detritus of our current world. Alex has designed a framework for fictional societies--using mandalas to envision rich cultures--integrating politics, economy, philosophy, and environment. With a map of the world as the foundation, richly imagined societies can be created. I will present the techniques I use for creating fictional geographies, Alex's techniques for world-building, and the societies imagined by students based on these techniques and my maps.

Time Travel with Cartography: Mapping Philadelphia’s Urban Landscape Evolution Across Two Centuries
Emily Zhou, University of Pennsylvania
In this presentation, I will delve into the process of reproducing old maps and rendering the early streetscapes of Philadelphia from an urban design project of mine focused on historic preservation. Drawing from historical land use maps, photographs, architectural data, and oral histories, we will compare the characteristics of maps and urban landscapes spanning three distinct eras in Philadelphia. Through this comparative analysis, I will discuss the various design decisions made at each stage of the project, which include choosing the texture, color, line-work, patterns, and typography. I will also outline the overall workflow from McNeel Rhino 3D to Adobe Software and share eight hands-on tips and tricks for designing historical maps in Illustrator as well as incorporating vintage effects into your work in Photoshop.

The Impact of WWII on Cartography
Judith Tyner, CSU Long Beach, emerita
Prior to WWII, cartography was a “mere tool” for geographers, not a discipline. There was only one American textbook, and few universities and colleges offered courses in cartography. There were also no courses in air photo interpretation and map reading. During and after the war, the number of universities that offered cartography classes increased dramatically and the subject had morphed from a tool to a discipline. This paper examines the impact of the war on the field over a short period of time.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, Map Collection Tours, Hauntology and Deep Time Spectres
Larry Laliberte, University of Alberta
In renewing ways to navigate institutional spaces of maps, and their containers, recent William C. Wonders map collection engagement workshops incorporated tactile ambience, aurals, and experiential movement to open up ways to re-read cartographic renderings as apparitions, situating their re-inscription, and retention in the spectres of deep time. By beckoning maps through hauntology – a praxis that disrupts the fabric of the normalized and operates in the fault lines of authorized histories, in-person tours construct terrains that interrogate and counter settler cartographies inhabiting a spatial corpus of colonial history. A history that continues to confer power, and haunt the landscape.

Mapping History Using Digital Tools
Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen
It's easy to think that our current maps represent a 1:1 relationship with the world as it is now; Google and others have given us tools to be able to navigate so effortlessly that the problem of mapping seems solved. Going back in time, though, presents a different set of challenges. Historical maps and spatial representations operate according to a different set of rules than our current maps do, and much can be lost in translation. Using examples from Stamen projects for the Alan Turing Institute, Columbia University, the Getty Institute, the University of Richmond, and Densho's maps of Japanese-American internment camps, among others, this talk will offer an overview of the problem space of historical mapping in a digital context, as well as provide examples of solutions arrived at through hard-won grapplings with sometimes difficult histories.

Dynamic Deployment and Mirroring of PostGIS Geospatial Data Repositories using Kubernetes, Helm and Other Open Source Technologies - a System Component-Based Approach to Geospatial Data Sharing and Publication Chris Mader, Timothy Norris & Julio Perez, University of Miami
Online GIS repositories (implemented using technologies such as ArcGIS Hub, for example) typically support two models for data access: data download; and API support. Here will we present a system component model for data sharing based on Kubernetes and PostGIS. We are using this approach at the University of Miami as part of the Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC) Geospatial Digital Special Collections (GDSC) data resource. This approach enables the replication of fully functional sets of PostGIS databases combined with API services that can be used to build de-coupled software applications, as well as for other purposes where mirroring pieces of a repository is beneficial. We will also present a quick case study of an actual software application, that used replicated components, for illustration purposes.

Discovering and Explaining Ecological Connectivity
Mir Rodriguez Lombardo, Almanaque Azul foundation
Awareness of ecological connectivity has become critical in a rapidly changing world and increasing fragmentation of natural areas. I will talk about how we met the challenges of not only creating a high-resolution map of functional ecological connectivity for Panama, but also of how to effectively communicate the results. Making the map began by assembling various data sources, then surveying experts and finally many iterations of running the data through a connectivity algorithm (Omniscape). We interpreted the results informed by environmental threats, as well as local land and water defense struggles, then liaised with teachers to created a digital and paper map of "natural corridors" intended to be used in the classroom.

Handling Complex Content within Georeferenced Historical Atlases
Adam Cox, Healthy Regions & Policies Lab, UIUC
While georeferencing a single map is an easy one-off process, applying the work across a whole atlas (or multi-volume set) is a challenging task--especially when pages have multiple insets and the atlas contains more than one category of maps. How do you structure this work, and create cohesive output? This presentation will describe the novel hierarchical approach within OldInsuranceMaps.net, a crowdsourced web georeferencing platform designed around the complexities of Sanborn fire insurance maps. Facilitating the creation of seamless mosaics from this collection has resulted in a robust, abstract workflow that could be applied to any other maps or collections as well.

Using Old Maps for New Insights on America’s Cities
Riley Champine, University of Richmond
Given the widespread attention redlining has received in recent years, some might think studying old maps of housing discrimination has grown stale. But even after a decade of work by the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), fresh documents, stories, and data continue to surface, leading to the release of the third version of their flagship project, Mapping Inequality. This talk will explore the latest features and design enhancements of the project website, illustrating how they add depth to an expanded collection of redlining documents. We'll also discuss the DSL's latest project and our efforts to incorporate detailed Sanborn fire insurance maps into the study of urban health disparities in redlined areas.

Continuing a Classic: Map Use, 9th Edition
Patrick Kennelly, Aileen Buckley, Esri; & Jon Kimerling
No other cartography textbook has withstood the test of time like Map Use: Reading Analysis, Interpretation. Since its debut in 1978―nearly a half-century ago―it has remained a stalwart companion for instructors, students, self-learners, and professionals. Map Use, 9th Edition, allows us to not only update the book with some of the best maps recently made, and produce the book in both print and e-book format, but it also provides us with a unique perspective into what has changed over the years―and what has remained the same. It allows us to evaluate what is currently most important in map use and mapmaking so that we can, in effect, present the state of the art in those areas of our field. Yet, for all that has changed over the years, the underlying philosophy of Map Use remains the same―a good map user must understand, at a basic level, what goes into the making of a map.