NACIS 2026

Getting Physical (with data): Crocheting Central Park
Natalie Correa, University of Wisconsin-Madison
In this talk, I discuss the challenges of planning and creating a crocheted map of Central Park in New York City. I outline planning considerations for the pattern, the logistics of crocheting, and the pressures of creating within a classroom environment. Along the way, I discuss the larger implications of seemingly impractical creative cartographic pursuits.

Watercolor Maps: the Long and Short of It
Molly O’Halloran, Molly O’Halloran, Inc.
A tale of two commissions: the year-plus creation of a visitor map for a California botanical garden, and the less-than-a-week production of a map and illustrations for a travel article in T Magazine (New York Times). Contrasting these two projects illustrates how the custom watercolor process can be modified to meet vastly different timelines and approval approaches.

Authenticity, Tangibility, and Sustainability in the GeoGraphics Lab
Alicia Iverson, Penn State Geography, The GeoGraphics Lab
Dr. Anthony C. Robinson, Penn State Geography, The GeoGraphics Lab
The current generation of (novice) cartographers have a dizzying array of fantastic digital tools to pursue our craft. In the GeoGraphics Lab we have noticed the novelty and value associated with creating tangible maps on paper and other materials, wrestling with their limitations, and working collaboratively to develop authentic products. In this talk we highlight examples that show how tangible mapping has surprised and challenged us, and we articulate a model for a university cartography lab experience that bolsters its own sustainability via the pursuit of authentic and tangible mapping.

Oil Portraits and Sign Painting
Dylan Moriarty, The Washington Post
Lessons learned from wading into oil portraits and sign painting.

Wayfinding Maps for the Museum of Exploration
Harrison Cole, The National Geographic Society
The National Geographic Museum of Exploration (MOE) relies on a variety of wayfinding maps to guide visitors to and throughout its space. And while wayfinding maps are indeed commonly referred to as “maps”, they often call for unique design and production approaches, distinct from, for example, a locator map on exhibit signage. My talk will explore the range of wayfinding maps created for the MOE, and how they might differ from more conventional reference or thematic maps.

Creative Cartography for Better Freight Planning
Meg Fredericks, CPCS
Griffin Rock, CPCS
The freight planning industry in the United States has traditionally valued functional visuals above design-driven maps and data visualizations. In our work at CPCS, we lean into setting ourselves apart by placing a higher value on cartographic design. Using static and interactive visualizations, we’ve transformed complex and occasionally dry datasets into maps that tell a story, influence policy decisions, and appeal to broader audiences. We’ll provide examples of freight maps that won over our clients and were ultimately featured in public-facing reports.

Leveling Up the Bus: Exploring Alternative Transit Cartographies
Carlos Gonzalez, Syracuse University
US transportation mapping is notorious for prioritizing car infrastructure. To oppose this tendency, I present alternative transportation maps for Syracuse, NY that center transit. I start by altering traditional transportation mapping conventions to only show bus lines before adopting more creative styles that capture the emotional journey of transit, a sense of space for bus lines, and a sense of place for destinations. I then offer a map showcasing the absence of transit on a regionwide level. I conclude with future challenges and opportunities for transit cartography.

Pixel by Pixel, Map by Map: Designing a VR Environment to Study How We Navigate Differently
Susannah Cox, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Bruno Wu, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Understanding how people navigate space requires tools capable of capturing the nuance of that process. This project developed an immersive VR environment in Unity for the Apple Vision Pro to study how adults with ADHD navigate compared to typically developing adults. Working on an emerging platform meant navigating a steep learning curve and solving unforeseen challenges along the way. This involved extensive trial and error, requiring us to rebuild the experiment from a pre-existing study and implement creative solutions to ensure participant comfort. The result is a functional, research-ready virtual environment for exploring how different people move through and make sense of their surroundings.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Pittsburgh District's New Schematic Map
Erik Breedon, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Pittsburgh District
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Pittsburgh District manages federal water management and inland navigation projects in the upper Ohio River watershed. While not as dizzying as Pittsburgh's street network, it's a difficult map to fit on a piece of paper. Acknowledging and inspired by 100 years of transit maps, geographer Erik Breedon simplified the hydrography and dozens of civil works projects in the district's area of responsibility into efficient schematic maps. This visual-heavy presentation will explore the evolution of these map products and the cartographic design decisions made along the way.

Crandall Cemetery: Mapping Culture, Protection, and Gullah/Geechee Resilience in Northeast Florida
Glenda Simmons Jenkins, Gullah Geechee Cultural Community Trust
Kathie Carswell, Gullah Geechee Cultural Community Trust
Christopher Mader, University of Miami IDSC
Theresa Pinto, P.E.E.R. Group
At the turn of the Twentieth Century, northeast Florida's formerly enslaved population increased as Gullah/Geechee Peoples from the coastal Carolinas and Georgia migrated into the region for railroad and timber jobs. They established communities, inside now vanished tenant labor camps, where they worshipped and buried their dead. Human burials remain on these Nassau County lands purchased and owned by a private, multinational timber corporation. In 2022 the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Community Trust (GGCCT) began advocating for the protection of African American burials, as development and climate change impacts threaten these sacred sites. GGCCT authored a management plan, used historic documents to develop maps, and conducted LIDAR analysis and drone mapping for Crandall Cemetery, an environmentally sensitive site near the St. Marys River.

The Foundational Cartography of Climate Change
John Cloud, Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Anthropology, Arctic Studies Center
Dr. Elisa Palomino ([email protected]) scholar of historic and contemporary boreal and arctic cultures, Cuenca, Spain
All cartographers, especially if working at global scales, map climate change, whether they realize it or not. Elisa Palomino and I propose a project linking two of the greatest cartographers of modernity. Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), born into the depths of the Little Ice Age, had access to historical records from the preceding Medieval Climate Anomaly; he presented the Northwest Passage as though it were still open. Richard Edes Harrison (1901-1994) became an "accidental cartographer" on the eve of the Second World War. His novel azimuthal projections, especially of boreal and arctic regions, presented the Modern Climate Anomaly already underway, before it was commonly realized.

Enterprising Women: University Women, Fundraising, and Adventures in the Map Trade
Christina Dando, University of Nebraska Omaha
In the late 1920s, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) began a "Million Dollar Fellowship Fund" to create a scholarship endowment for women's graduate education. One of the activities that AAUW branches undertook to raise funds was the creation and sale of pictorial maps. The Hibbing Minnesota Branch created a historical map of "The Arrowhead," published in 1929, that was so successful that it is still available today. Using the Hibbing branch's records (meeting minutes, letters, newsletters, sales logs), I examine the women's intentional engagement in the map trade to further women's higher education.

How the Thirsty Have Fallen: A Look at the Changing Colorado Craft Brewing Industry Through Maps
Kristopher Kuzera University of Denver
For nearly half a century, the Colorado Craft Beer Industry has seen incredible growth. However, within the past decade, the industry has seen substantial change where once successful organizations have closed their doors and new locations are becoming increasingly scarce. Numerous factors contribute to the recent shift in the once vibrant Colorado trade, including changing consumption patterns, economic stress, ownership turnover, and slow pandemic recovery. Although this research focuses on Colorado, these patterns are largely universal around the United States. This paper will use mapping to explore how the industry in Colorado has reshaped in recent years, from competition to collaboration, from small community origins to nationwide accessibility and back again. We will look at spatial and temporal patterns of brewery distribution across different regions to see where the largest shifts are occurring and what impacts that might have. We celebrate diversity of ownership, production, and participation among women and members of minority communities, which has changed the face of Colorado craft beer. The future of craft beer as a unique cultural experience in Colorado will be explored.

The Mexico Valley After Conquest as Depicted by the “Map of Tenochtitlan”
Fatima Koli Barnard College
Gergely Baics, Barnard College
Caterina Pizzigoni, Barnard College
Ines Perez, Barnard College
What can a nearly 500 year old map reveal about a world transformed by conquest and its mapmakers? Created by Indigenous Nahua scholars, the Map of Tenochtitlan (c. 1530s) offers a rare Indigenous view of Mexico City and the Valley of Mexico. Blending Nahua and European cartographic traditions, it depicts interconnected urban and social worlds. While often studied as art, we examine it from a spatial history lens. Georeferencing this map, a challenge given its multiple scales, reveals the mapmakers’ underlying visions and priorities. Digitizing and creating an archive of the map opens up the possibility to reflect on the complex human and natural ecosystems of the Mexico Valley that survived and continued to thrive after conquest.

Visualizing the Complex World of 1492
Brandon Plewe Brigham Young University
Historical Geography is complicated, especially the pre-modern world where even basic concepts like "country" and "border" were less standardized than they are today. How can we map this world in a way that is simple to enter and store, intellectually honest, and easy for a broad audience to understand? The political geography of 1492 presents an especially fruitful case for this. To create a map of the world at this "Pivot of History," a strategy was developed (based on multiple past experiences with historical GIS and cartography) to represent uncertainty and vagueness in a simple form in GIS. Most notably, boundaries were stored with a general sense of width, ranging from modern-looking, legally defined lines to broad frontier zones that were dozens or even hundreds of miles wide, that were only vaguely defined and/or only loosely controlled. Using an algorithm of GIS analysis tools, this dataset is automatically transformed into a fuzzy set estimation of Territoriality, then visualized cartographically so that each state (or even different portions of each state) appear more or less "fuzzy." The net effect is that map readers get a rather complete view of a pre-Eurocentric World, but also get a rather honest view of where we have more or less knowledge of that world.

What Do Young Adults Think About Mobile Thematic News Maps?
Lily Houtman, Penn State University
Data journalism is one of the key ways the public encounters mobile thematic maps. There is emerging research on how to best design mobile maps for data journalism, but most of these studies focus on the map producers rather than map audiences. Here, I present the results from a series of focus groups to assess how audiences feel about a variety of design decisions. Specifically, these focus groups consisted of young adults audiences, due to concerns from data journalists that young people are not reading the news. Here, I present a summary of audience opinions related to interactivity, mobile design, map personalization, and thematic map type.

Under Pressure: How Stress Impacts the Map User
Bill Limpisathian, NeuroCarto Research Group, UW Cart Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Brynn D. Patrello, NeuroCarto Research Group, UW Cart Lab, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Maps are often used in times of stress, yet we know very little about how a user’s psychological state shapes their map use. To fix this, we investigated how acute psychological stress influences cartographic interaction, including task performance and map perceptions. We used the proven Maastricht Acute Stress Test to induce stress in map users and compared their performance to a non-stressed control group. In this talk, we will discuss our findings and highlight what cartographers should do to cope with designing maps for stressful situations.

Giving attention to ADHD in cartography and visualization: design guidelines informed by a review and user study
Ab Mosca (they/them), Smith College
Heather Rosenfeld (they/she), Smith College
There has been surprisingly little research on the interplay between neurodivergence and usability of maps and general visualizations. This project begins to address this gap, particularly focusing on people with ADHD. We reviewed extant academic and professional research and guidelines on accessible cartography and data visualization in terms of their applicability to ADHD map/visualization users. Informed by this and by preliminary interviews with ADHD folks, we developed a user study. The study focuses on tactile mapping, a technique primarily studied for its usefulness to blind and visually impaired communities, but which we hypothesize also has promise for neuro-accessibility. Informed by our literature review and study results we present preliminary recommendations for ADHD-friendly map and visualization design.

Trust in Maps: A mixed-methods cartographic user study
Amelia Rudolph, Pennsylvania State University
Dr. Meghan Kelly, Syracuse University
Dr. Carolyn Fish, University of Oregon
User studies have emerged as a cartographic method particularly well-suited to analyze visual stimuli hosted online like digital and interactive maps. We ask: Does map trust vary between base map (i.e., vector-base maps and raster-base maps) and map types (e.g., reference maps and thematic maps)? We test these variables across two map locations resulting in a 2x2x2 between-subjects factorial study design. In our evaluation, we expand Prestby’s (2024) quantitative MAPTRUST assessment by including supplemental qualitative questions. From our results, we argue for continued evaluations of map trust through mixed methods approaches.

Making vivid maps: Expressive Geovisualization for Representing Spatial Vulnerability
Zhaoxu Sui, GeoGraphics Lab, Penn State
Cartographic representations of spatial vulnerability are used to explain key challenges in environment and health. Vulnerability maps can help us understand threats to people and the environment. They are often used to drive decision-making to create effective interventions. In this paper, we review existing approaches for static cartographic methods for representing vulnerability and we propose a new method called Expressive Geovisualization (EG) which employs visual representation methods that reflect the real-world context of thematic geospatial data. EG is designed to have visual impact that ensures vividness beyond traditional cartographic representation methods. We evaluate this new method through a user experiment comparing it with traditional approaches to characterize their potential utility and usability.