NACIS 2024

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.