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.

Freelance and small business cartography roundtable
Nat Case, INCase, LLC
Daniel Huffman (they/them), somethingaboutmaps.com
A perennial open-ended discussion for those interested in becoming (or growing) a cartography-based business. Daniel Huffman will share the results of his annual survey of freelance cartographers, and Nat Case will share a brief outline of ""13 things I've learned about starting out as a freelance cartographer"" and then we open the floor to questions, answers, discussion, performance art… whatever helps you make sense of the ever-changing world of the business of map-making.

Critically Engaged Cartographic AI - a panel of enthusiasts, critics, and practitioners
Jim Thatcher, Oregon State University
Craig Dalton, Hofstra University
Anthony Robinson, Penn State University
Artificial Intelligence is both the technology and buzzword of the moment. Its impacts are being felt in acts as divergent as package sorting in dimly lit factories to bombing campaigns in active war zones. In each, the role between human and machine, between labor and commodity, continues to be reshaped by an all consuming capital-infused technological push. Cartography is being reshaped by these forces and, like many other areas of society, has seen a rapid and often rabid disjuncture between enthusiastic, wholesale embrace of AI and its integration into every facet of cartographic praxis and the full rejection of Cartographic AI as “slop.” This panel provides a more nuanced outlook on the matter - recognizing the inevitability of the technology, but doing so thoughtfully and with intent. Bringing together a wide spectrum of scholars and practitioners with diverse views and engagements with AI, we explore how cartographic praxis can be reshaped by thinking with AI rather than it thinking for cartographers.

How Are Static Maps Actually Made? A Workflow-Based Discussion on Cartographic Practice and Education
Yanbing Chen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Alicia Cowart, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This Birds of a Feather session invites cartographers, educators, students to collectively unpack how static maps are created in current professional practice. The session begins with participants’ lived workflows: how they receive a mapping task, gather and clean data, choose tools, move between GIS and graphic design software, revise drafts, respond to feedback, prepare files for publication, and evaluate the final map. Through a collaborative workflow-mapping and card-sorting activity, participants will identify common stages in static map production, document where key decisions happen, and compare these stages with existing GIS&T Body of Knowledge components. Special attention will be given to tool-mediated decisions: for example, what specific steps (generalization, visual design etc.) occurs in ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, Mapshaper, Adobe Illustrator, scripting environments, or through manual visual editing. The goal is to surface forms of practical cartographic knowledge that may be underrepresented in current cartography and GIS education, and to discuss how curricula might better reflect contemporary static map production.

How to Map with Context: A Collaborative Exploration for Mapmakers
Ester Scheck, TU Wien
Meghan Kelly, Syracuse University

Just as every map is based on the mapmaker’s conscious and unconscious decisions, every dataset – the basis of any map – is shaped by its production context. Understanding this context is essential for data analysis and visualization because data is never neutral or objective. So, what can it look like to research and reflect on the dataset production context as part of the map-making workflow? In this co-creation session, we will discuss and explore approaches to doing so by focusing on the perspectives of the participants, of people making maps. Through interactive and creative methods, we will brainstorm relevant aspects and prototype tools that focus on understanding and incorporating the context of data production into the map-making workflow. The session will foster exchange and learning from each other to strengthen responsible and ethical data practices in cartography. The work will be documented, and the results will – in aggregated and anonymized form – contribute to Ester Scheck’s doctoral research.