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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.