NACIS 2024

Terrain Cartography for Non-Terrainers
Lourdes Ginart, Department of State
Terrain cartography can be difficult for those of us who never received formal training in the skill. For years I struggled to understand how to create shaded relief and I didn't want to rely on pre-made relief all the time. I wanted to make some of my own! Yet, once I learned I struggled to accept the time and software commitment. Many of my maps require shaded relief, but only as a background component, it is rarely the main feature. Finally after much trial and error, I developed a workflow that allowed me to create beautiful yet simple shaded relief with a lower time and software commitment. In this presentation, I'll show you what that workflow looks like, the results, and will hopefully make terrain cartography less intimidating for folks starting out.

Freestyling: Mapping Mountain Landscapes with Blender’s Non-Photorealistic Renderer
Andrew Tyrrell, South Arrow Maps (freelance cartographer)
Blender has been adopted by many cartographers. It is a useful tool for generating natural (though also potentially unnatural) looking terrain shading. Its physical based renderer can be used to create realistic effects which can be incorporated into maps as one or more raster layers. Less well known is Blender’s non-photorealistic renderer: Freestyle. Freestyle detects silhouettes, edges, and creases of virtual objects, which can be styled as vectors either within Blender or in graphics software such as Adobe Illustrator. This presentation provides an overview of how I use Freestyle to create stylised oblique views of mountain landscapes, illustrating backcountry hiking trips, summers spent in the wilderness, and trans-Alpine adventures.

Procedural Mapping with Geometry Nodes in Blender
Peter Atwood, University of South Carolina
Blender has recently been updated with a new tool called Geometry Nodes, a powerful system for procedurally generating and transforming 3D geometry. This talk will provide a general overview of some of the cartographic applications of this new tool. We'll look at how to get our data into Blender, how to use Geometry Nodes plot it in 3D space, and how to use Blender's attribute system and material editor to dynamically generate and animate symbols and colours to bring our map to life.

Forget About Tilesets – How to Use Static Files for Performant Interactive Stories
William Davis, The New York Times
Slippy maps are essential to web cartography, but they often include unnecessary data and can render inconsistently as individual tiles are processed. In this talk, I’ll share examples of web maps that use static json, png and mp4 files to create smoother storytelling experiences on interactive maps. You’ll also learn how to start building similar maps using open-source tools like gdal, ffmpeg, mapshaper, and maplibre GL JS.

Basemaps Don't Have To Be Boring
Brandon Liu, Protomaps LLC
Basemaps for web mapping: boring, or exciting? Basemaps are an essential part of any web map, whether they're from Google, Esri or an OpenStreetMap-based provider. You might think basemaps are a "solved problem": choosing an existing off-the-shelf lets cartographers move on to more interesting problems. What if basemaps were exciting? What if, more importantly, interactive, global-scale basemaps could be downloaded, created and customized using simple open source tools? This talk will go over how to do just that using the Protomaps basemap, including data sources (Natural Earth, OSM, Overture), cartographic generalization strategies, label localization, and customization for the practical cartographer.

LEGO Topographic Mapping 
Atlas Guo, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Calling all LEGO enthusiasts! Have you ever dreamed of bringing your love for LEGO bricks into a topographic map? Join me in unveiling the secrets behind my physical LEGO map of Wisconsin, and a virtual 3D-rendered LEGO map of Colorado! Practically, ArcGIS Pro will be used for exploratory map design, and LEGO Studio for further configurations and 3D rendering. But the adventure doesn’t end there! I will try to briefly review and discuss the essential elements relevant to LEGO cartography. Feeling inspired? Let your imagination soar and get ready to craft your very own LEGO map masterpiece!

Making a 3D Relief Globe
Zhaoxu Sui, Pennsylvania State University
If you want to DIY a globe for yourself, I will give you my experiences of crafting a 3D relief globe when I was in high school, including what materials I used, how I sketched out the coastline and important topographic features, how I made 3D topographic relief, and how I painted based on the vegetation. It is really fun and family friendly, so try out!

Slip 'N Slide: Getting Funky with Open Source Slippy Maps 
Janice Kai Chen, The Washington Post
Don't get me wrong — I love a slick, modern slippy basemap (CartoDB Positron?? I owe you my life.) But I also love me some maximalism of 2000s internet...and sometimes I love a lot of pink...and sometimes I want lots of birds on my map. We can have it all! In this talk, we'll go through different ways to add a personal flair to your maps with MapLibre, an open source library for designing and publishing interactive web maps.

Making Animated Maps That are Interactive using Adobe Animate
Michael Cattell, The Pennsylvania State University
Adobe Animate is a way for cartographers to turn a static map into an animated map with interactive elements. In this talk, I walk through a workflow for bringing geospatial data into Animate, adding animations, and then adding web elements to allow users to play, pause, and click around the animation to learn more about the data. This allows for key messages to be highlighted and for map users to explore the data. The example used is an animated map of Amtrak’s long-distance route that highlights stations only served at night-time.

Map Animations with Design in Mind - Harnessing the Best Parts of Multiple Mapping Tools to Make Great Looking Animations
Jamie Robertson, Panthera
Getting a map animation to look exactly the way you want can be tricky–sometimes a single tool will do most of what you want, but compromises to your intended design are often made. By using the powerful Temporal Controller feature of QGIS to manage the data-driven aspects of the animation and Adobe Illustrator/MAPublisher to control the basemap and typography, its possible to have your cake and eat it too. With a fascinating dataset collected on the Olympic Peninsula, we'll explore how the process works, the important settings to make the various software packages to play nicely together, and the tips and tricks that will save you a lot of headaches on your next map animation project.

Blending Modes Demystified
Charles Preppernau, ESRI
Blending modes are a powerful tool for compositing layers in our mapping projects, but what exactly are they doing, and how do they work? What exactly is happening under the hood when you select modes like Exclusion or Vivid Light, and how can you as a cartographer take advantage of their behavior? This talk aims to provide an introduction and some reference materials for understanding how blending modes work, how you can use that knowledge in your cartography, and a demonstration of some interesting ways that some of the more obscure modes can be used.

Mapping with Satellite Data (Beyond Landsat and Sentinel-2) 
Robert Simmon, Self-Employed (TBD)
National and international scientific agencies like NASA, NOAA, and the ESA have been monitoring the Earth at a global scale for decades. The data they have collected include specialized measurements like land cover classification, ocean color, vegetation health, and solar energy absorbed at the Earth’s surface. Unfortunately, much of this data is rarely mapped, in part because it is stored and distributed in scientific formats that can be difficult or impossible to read with off the shelf tools. In this talk I will show how to use GDAL to extract data from Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) into formats readable by commonplace mapping software.

Messing Around with Voronoi Diagrams
Thomas Coughlin, Esri
In mathematics, a Voronoi diagram is a partition of a plane into regions where each location within a region is closer to its associated point that to any other input point. As a beginner mapmaker participating in the #30DayMapChallenge, one of my greatest challenges was figuring out the possibilities of what maps I could make beyond choropleth and bivariate maps. I think Voronoi diagrams are great for novice mapmakers looking to add some simple spatial analysis to their mapmaking. Come hear about Voronoi diagrams in nature, some of my mapmaking projects with them, and how you can add them to your own maps with commercial and open-source software.

Symbol Fonts: an Automated Workflow
Kate Leroux & Tony Cannistra, onX Maps
As an outdoor-focused company, onX uses many icons to designate recreational points of interest on our maps. In this talk, we’ll first describe how we use Figma to organize icons across our apps and communicate our iconography with other internal teams. We’ll also share the automated workflow we developed that builds stylesheet glyphs and font files for web clients, and ensures a stable synchronization of glyph identifiers across our systems.

3D Mapping Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark Utilizing LiDAR and Architectural Illustration 
Guthrie Alexander
A walkthrough of how terrestrial LiDAR and architectural illustration techniques were utilized to create a accurate 3D map of Kennecott Mines National Historic Landmark for use in the updated Unigrid brochure.

Making Complex Labels Work! Leveraging Label Expressions, Abbreviation Dictionaries, Priorities and Placement Properties in ArcGIS Pro 
Carl Swanson, Oregon Department of Forestry
Oregon Department of Forestry’s Protection District Maps are 1:100,000 products that cover each of ODF’s 12 districts across the state. Comprised of 53 maps that cover around 74,000 square miles, they are used by local ODF district staff and are sold to the public for recreational use. Formerly, these maps were made with annotation and map graphics for labels. Over the last few years our GIS Team has focused on moving our Protection District Maps from annotation and graphic labels to dynamic labeling using the attributes from our enterprise data. This presentation will describe our label strategy, with some practical examples of our label expressions and cartographic process.

Building Tiny Custom Web Maps
Stephanie May
Ever wondered how you can create custom web maps for your portfolio, passion project, or job WITHOUT setting up a tile server, web server, or cloud services account? Hoping to do it without too much coding or cost? Got some maps you made and just want to display with a little bit of interactivity? This talk will walk you quickly through what you need to do to create and show interactive web maps serverlessly with PMtiles, Protomaps JS, and MapLibre.

How to Mop the MAUP?
Maggie Mateu, atopia
The Modifiable Area Unit Problem (MAUP) occurs when quantities of a spatial phenomenon are aggregated into spatial partitions or areal units (such as countries, districts or a grid). The resulting summary values (totals, rates or densities) are influenced by both the shape and scale of the aggregation unit and often distort the real phenomenon’ spatial repartition. There are a few ways of overcoming this issue, by getting rid of spatial partitions and playing with cartographic design. I will be using QGIS to show you step-by-step some easy tips and tricks I’ve been using to mop the MAUP.

Automated Geoprocessing and GIS Analysis for Recreational Trail Maps
Jake Belan & Chuck Kitterman, Green Trails Maps
Utilizing open-source GIS data, our presentation will showcase a handful of geoprocessing scripts (using PyQGIS) and workflows to identify optimal areas for new map development, vector data processing, raster pre-processing, GPX data cleanup, metadata management, cartographic automation, and more! Join us to explore how these tools can enhance marketing strategies through spatial analysis and simplify map production using Python. These advancements can empower GIS users to make data-driven decisions and enhance GIS workflows.

Scrolly Map with Drone Footage? Alignment and Interactivity of Drone Footage in a Map-Based Scrollytelling Story
Shane Loeffler, CarbonPlan
Transitioning seamlessly from a standard scrollytelling map into drone footage presented several challenges - with alignment and interactivity. Here I’ll walk the audience through my thought process for acquiring and aligning drone footage with a scrolling map sequence, as well as an overview of several options for tying the playback of the footage to scroll events. My anchor for this presentation will be a story I worked on with ProPublica - ‘The Tragedy of North Birmingham.’

The Shining: Mapping with Sparkle
Kenneth Field, ESRI
Some places are like people: some shine and some don't. And maps that represent these places can shine too, quite literally. I’ll share the design processes, decision-making, digital workflows, and the development of new styles to create custom thematic symbology that reflect the U.S. Total Eclipse of April 2024. I’ll do my best to share this work with a polish, rather than dull, talk on teasing out how we can make paper maps really glimmer. I’ll also share some shiny new resources for the wider community to support making maps with luster.

Hand-Drawn and Antique Map Styles with QGIS
Andy Woodruff
Do you love the look of hand-drawn maps? Are you, like me, bad at drawing things by hand? Come along to learn the next best thing: faking it with computers! We’ll look at how to create some hand-drawn and/or antique map styles in QGIS—expressions, geometry generators, and more—including general tips as well as specific styles and examples to download.

Making Data Tactile Using 3D-printed Maps
Lester Carver, Boston College
This presentation will demonstrate how to build 3D maps for printing using the free and open-source software, Blender. Going beyond printing 3D topographic maps, this talk focuses on representing spatial data in a 3D format in order to offer a mixed, visual and tactile experience for communicating data to users instead of a purely visual experience. It explores how making data tactile can make data visualization more accessible to users with limited or impaired vision and can engage users in new and unique ways.

Creative Uses of Visual Media in Storytelling
Warren Davison, Esri
Photos, illustrations, and maps are powerful tools for visual storytelling. Compositing these elements together within web maps can open the door for endless creative exploits. This talk explores some creative combinations of media and maps for storytelling in ArcGIS StoryMaps, from the conventional to the unconventional, and how they can be used to craft engaging visual experiences.

Mapping for 911/Emergency Dispatch
David Nuttall, Artimaps, LLC, and Santa Clara County Communications
This talk will look at David’s non-art maps, his “other life” as a consultant working with GIS for 911 and Emergency Dispatch operations. What are the mapping and data needs for a communications center dealing with incoming calls and then the dispatching of emergency vehicles? This talk will look at the data sources, manipulations required, the end-user facing maps and how they differ from other uses of GIS data to allow for the extremely time-sensitive workflow of a 911 center and in-vehicle use. David will use his work with Santa Clara County, CA as a use-case for all aspects of this unusual GIS workflow.

Bringing Print Techniques into the Digital World: Blend Modes for Map Tiles
Amelia Hagen-Dillon, onX Maps
Advanced blending techniques have long been used in the creation of static maps where cartographers can leverage advanced tools like Photoshop and Blender to combine raster layers in a way that adds depth and detail instead of obscuring or flattening an image. Tile-based mapping applications have struggled to leverage those tools in a scalable way. In this talk, we'll look at a method of introducing advanced blending techniques for map tiles and how we leveraged it at onX to create vibrant bathymetry tiles for lakes in Minnesota.

Vignettes for the Win!
John Nelson, ESRI
As a photography student I spent many hours in the darkroom exposing a backlit negative onto photographic paper. Without a doubt the most magical part of the process, from my perspective, was selectively exposing various parts of the print to more or less light; we called it dodging and burning. Painting with light. A large element of dodging and burning was creating a vignette around the print: a faded perimeter of more or less exposure to draw the eye into the center of the composition. Let's talk about that from the cartographer's perspective.

Nick Zentner is a distinguished geologist, educator, and award-winning host dedicated to sharing his passion for science beyond the traditional classroom setting. He has been teaching geology at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington since 1992.
Mr. Zentner received the esteemed James Shea Award in 2015 and the Geological Society of America Public Service Award in 2023, recognizing his outstanding contributions to advancing public understanding of earth sciences.
His PBS TV series “Nick on the Rocks” has received significant acclaim, including two Emmy Awards, for its informative content and compelling storytelling. Additionally, he hosts an engaging YouTube Livestream Series, which brings joy to the learning process.