NACIS 2026

Cross-Cutting Crops and Culture: Coping with overlaps, time, and fuzzy boundaries in an ethnobotanical garden
Catherine Callaway, UC Berkeley
This interactive session is a space to puzzle out the limits of language and spatial representation in a botanical garden’s ethnobotanical collection.
Plants aren’t versed in borders, and their diversity and distribution is such that overlapping geographic ranges and dispersal over time make it difficult to find intelligible yet true ways to represent the history of humans and our crop plants in a museum setting.
Beginning with an overview of crop plants’ origins from around the world from an ethnobotanist’s perspective and transitioning into a small-group session of ideation and problem-solving, we will tackle these problems from a cartographer’s perspective.

Commissioned v. Personal Mapping
David Nuttall, Artimaps, LLC
This discussion will look at the differences in data, information, and time related to personal projects versus commissioned maps. What are the considerations, priorities, time management, and decisions that go into each and how can you juggle what you want to do (including intentionally donating your work) with what you might get paid to do!
Applicable to freelance cartographers as well as people who want to create some maps on the side or anyone with an interesting mix of work and projects.

raging against the machine
Natalie Correa, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Raechel Portelli, University of Illinois
Alicia Iverson, Penn State
Generative AI tools can now produce maps in seconds. As automated workflows become the default path from data to map, we question what the future of cartographic practice looks like. Drawing on humanistic geography, feminist epistemology, and critical cartography, we will engage with creative and embodied methods—hand-drawn annotation, fieldwork sketching, tactile design, participatory mapping—as ways to explore what is at stake when the cartographer’s body, judgment, and creative process are removed from the act of mapping. Through these non-digital methods and group discussion, we will foreground positionality and make visible the interpretive labor algorithmic cartography tends to obscure.