NACIS 2026

Ribbon Maps: A brief talk on a lengthy format
Aaron Koelker, NYS Geospatial Services Bureau
What is a ribbon map? Are they helpful on the go? Can you tie them in a bow? This talk may or may not answer these questions. I'll start with a brief overview of a niche map format, including some past and present examples with (im)practical usage. Then I'll spend the rest of the talk running through some of my own ribbon maps I've made.

The Sticky Notes We Needed Earlier - Because Mappers Need Pep Talks Too
Rebecca Ramsey
Every GIS professional has experienced staring at a map, workflow, or project while quietly wondering, “Am I even good at this?” From newbie analysts to seasoned cartographers, self-doubt and imposter syndrome can follow even the most accomplished professionals. This presentation takes inspiration from motivational sticky notes, office posters, and small reminders that help people keep going. Through humor, relatable stories, and encouraging takeaways, attendees will leave with practical ways to build confidence, support one another, and remember that nobody becomes an expert without first making a few questionable maps along the way.

Cartotopologies: Toward a Debris Cartography
Alexis Wood, University of California, Berkeley
Cartotopologies asks how cartography might register extraction not as event, but as a spatial process whose effects endure, accumulate, and fold unevenly across a landscape. Reworking Mount Shasta’s contour lines into spatiotemporal rings (function analogously to tree rings), the project uses spatial reparameterization to redistribute uniform time through a differentiated space, rendering events as topological inscription rather than a historical point. Drawing on critical cartography, relational spatial theory, and debates on abstraction, the map treats landscape not as a stable surface to be represented, but as something continually produced through accumulation and resistance. This presentation focuses on the project’s theoretical framework and the mathematical operations that structure its form.

The world on a basketball
Andy Woodruff, Freelance cartographer
In 2024 I collaborated with cartographer-turned-NBA-analyst Kirk Goldsberry to create a globe that doubles as a real, court-ready basketball. The challenge: a standard basketball is divided into eight weirdly shaped panels, not traditional globe gores. This short presentation will explain how I figured out the right map projections to use, how we designed an appealing map on a bumpy basketball surface, and how the right salesperson can turn a nice but simple map into a collector's item. We'll also see some potential future basketball globe designs.

Human and Colloquial Scale in Digital Maps
Jia Zhang, Brennan Center for Justice and Columbia University
I started thinking more about how to understand scale when my son asked how many seconds it was until the weekend. The length of one second was a tangible thing to a child, equivalent to a tick tock sound he can make on his own. 5 minutes meant almost nothing. When tectonic plates move at the same speed as my fingernails grow, it is not slow or fast, it simply is. There is a long tradition of measuring things with ones’ own body, at arms lengths, by stride, and Smoot. How do we make use of colloquial and biological units in digital maps? In this talk I present a series of interactive maps using alternative measurements to highlight intuitive and biological understandings of scale, by football fields, Eiffel towers, giraffes, and sleeps.