NACIS 2026

Mapping New Deal Utopias: Dynamics of Neighborhood Mobility in Greendale, Wisconsin
Mia Nighgroh, University of Tennessee Knoxville
Utopian planned communities like Greendale, WI were championed during the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal’s efforts to create model suburban communities and facilitate economic stability for low- and middle-income white families. Following the end of the New Deal, the neighborhood transitioned from federal to private funding. Utopian communities like Greendale were designed to promote financial stability, but the shifting economic landscape destabilized the geographic and social structure that had been established. This research examines the dynamics of mobility and sheds light on the migratory strategies residents used to navigate the economic precarity of structural change.

Mapping What Was Hidden: A LiDAR Approach to Unmarked Graves and Land Justice
Spenser Anderson
Kristopher Smith, Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC)
Accurate methods for locating unmarked grave sites, including ground penetration radar, arborist analysis, and walking sites, are precise but resource intensive. Given the vast number of unmarked burial sites in the States, faster and cheaper preliminary tools are needed. Using LiDAR data and historical records, we have developed a Red-Green-Amber model that enables individuals, organizations, and researchers to screen large swaths of land and prioritize sites for further investigation; thus, improving the speed and reach of unmarked grave site identification. For communities navigating heirs' property disputes, where unmarked graves can both evidence historical land use and complicate title resolution, this tool aids in the fight for justice.

The Geography of Prosperity
Nina Feldman Motivf, Web Cartographer
Tova Perlman, Motivf, Data Scientist
AJ Ashton, Carotgrapher
This presentation introduces the Geography of Prosperity Index, a new framework for evaluating long-term urban success across 250 U.S. cities. Moving beyond traditional economic metrics, the index integrates five dimensions: population renewal, climate resilience, automation readiness, social cohesion, and governance/foresight, to assess future readiness. Geography of Prosperity Index results are visualized through an interactive map that reveals emerging patterns of opportunity and risk. The session will explore the methodology, cartographic design choices, and key spatial insights, highlighting how mapping prosperity can better inform planners, policymakers, and investors about the evolving geography of the American Dream.

Reconstructing a neighborhood through community mapping: Urban renewal in Warren, Ohio
Jennifer Mapes, Kent State University
More than 1,000 U.S. cities lost whole neighborhoods to urban renewal in the 1950s-1970s. Records about the demographics and economics of these places are surprisingly hard to find. This paper describes efforts to document businesses, and later individuals, located in one of these neighborhoods. About 2,784 people lived in The Flats in Warren, Ohio in 1950 before the urban renewal area was identified in 1964. Our research shows that this was a racially integrated neighborhood and that displacements of urban renewal created a more segregated city. This research creates a framework for other small cities to document the individual- and neighborhood-level effects of this destructive policy.

Rooted Out: Gender, Hiring, and Disappearance in the Robinson Cartographic Family Tree
Helen Tosteson, UW-Madison
The Robinson academic family tree traces four generations of cartographic scholarship from a single root: Dr. Arthur Robinson. At UW-Madison, this tree is prized. But a closer look at its branches reveals a striking pattern: women are dramatically underrepresented, particularly as advisor nodes. I present a gendered analysis of the tree, examining where women appear, and where they disappear. Through generational counting and career tracing, I argue that the academic leak occurs through differential hiring into research universities, transitions into government and industry, and in at least one case, outright omission from the tree itself.

Audio Cartography: The New Frontier
Brandon Biggs, CEO of XR Navigation
For thousands of years, cartography has been either visual or tactile. We invite you to join us to learn how cartography can now extend to sound. Learn about auditory icons, ways to hear shapes, understand spatial relationships using your ears, and listen to the world. Through real-world examples and live demonstrations, attendees will experience how audio can communicate iconology, distance, direction, topological relationships, orientation, and environmental context in ways traditional maps simply cannot. We’ll also discuss accessibility, map design, and why auditory cartography may fundamentally be a paradigm shift in cartography, expand who maps are built for, and how humans interact with space itself."

Sound Cartography: Listening as a Cartographic Practice
Nuzhat Tabassum Nawshin, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Cartography has long been treated as a visual medium, but spatial experience is also shaped by listening, movement, and divided attention. In this talk, I review selected strands of sound cartography, from soundscape studies and sonification to audiovisual and locative audio mapping. I discuss how these approaches expand what maps can communicate about place, narrative, uncertainty, and mobile spatial experience, while revealing unresolved questions about design guidance, evaluation, and real-world use. I use these questions to consider how sound cartography might develop as a more experimental and inclusive practice.

What does a smell look like? Considerations for olfactory cartography
Jake Steinberg, The Minnesota Star Tribune
Most maps depict what our eyes can see and the ground we can feel under our feet. But what about the other senses? In this talk, I will discuss a map I made for the Minnesota Star Tribune depicting the landscape of smells — or, smellscape — of the Minnesota State Fair, where the aroma of roasting corn is as prominent as any mountain. Depicting smells visually isn’t easy. I offer a whiff of what I learned from this olfactory cartographic challenge.

Beyond Long-Form Cartographic Improvisation: Composition, Columbaria, Dance, and a Return to the Atlas
Eric Theise
Since its 2022 Lisbon premiere I’ve given 50+ performances of A Synesthete’s Atlas across North America & Europe. Until 2026 these projected map manipulations were typically ~50 minute collaborations with improvising musicians recruited in cities I tour through. This talk discusses recent developments that break with this practice including:
• commissioned, composed works
• site-specific performances
• collaborations with choreographers
• integration with movement sensors
• breaking long-form improvisation into movements, guided by structure &titles taken from atlases
The talk includes extensive video documentation and is complemented by Saturday evening’s performance at Woodland Pattern (see Workshops/Field Trips).

A Thousand Raves: Towards a Posthuman Cartography of Electronic Dance Music Culture
Zach Thorpe, UC Berkeley
Conventional cartographic design often upholds subject-centered logics, leading to maps that represent complex places as fixed spaces. How would one incorporate relationality and becoming within maps to open alternatives to this paradigm? This talk explores these possibilities by outlining how posthumanism can be used as a critical praxis for developing a theoretical foundation, methodology and set of practical applications for a “posthuman cartography”. Using EDM/rave culture as an affective and technologically mediated site of mapping, this research challenges cartographic humanism in favor of maps that attend to becoming rather than being, culminating in an interactive posthuman map.

Earthling Maps: A Locator Map Maker Beyond Web Mercator
Brian T. Jacobs, Habitable Worlds
Earthling Maps is a new way for a broad audience to make locator maps, whether local, regional, or planetary extents, without compromising on cartographic principles. To achieve this, the app uses a novel map renderer that automatically switches map projections appropriate to scale—far beyond Web Mercator and globes—with a fully labeled and highly customizable basemap out of the box. This talk will demo the app and discuss its design and development, detailing the tech used to reproject global tilesets with custom projections in real time. The talk will also cover best practices for producing locator maps that embed and read well on small screens, in emails, browsers, and video.

From Open Source to Newsroom: Integrating a New Mapping System at Reuters
Casey Miller, Thomson Reuters
Scott Reinhard, [email protected]
Bringing a new open-source mapping system into a large news organization takes more than good code. It takes translation between the people building infrastructure and the people making daily graphics. In this joint talk, we'll share two sides of the adoption story at Reuters: the technical work of setting up the system and collaborating with newsroom engineers, and the design work of wrapping it into reusable components for the graphics team. We'll cover the tradeoffs of developer-oriented tooling, what it takes to get something actually used, and lessons learned along the way.

From Global Mapper to MAPublisher: A Production Cartography Workflow
Oliver Normanton, Avenza Systems Inc
Rebecca Bennett
Jessica Vachon
Gabriel Demizio
This talk presents a practical, end-to-end workflow bridging Global Mapper and MAPublisher for professional map production. Topics include layer and attribute preparation in Global Mapper, export strategies that carry styling directly into Illustrator, and importing and refining that data in MAPublisher and Adobe Illustrator. The presentation also covers scripting and batch processing to automate repetitive preparation tasks. Rather than a rigid step-by-step process, the presentation offers adaptable strategies that address common friction points in the pipeline, giving professional cartographers practical tools for faster, cleaner map production.

Preserving the Legacy of USGS Topographic Maps
Andrew Stauffer, U.S. Geological Survey
Elaine Guidero, U.S. Geological Survey
From hand-engraved copper plates to scribed mylar, 1884–2006 USGS topographic maps were paper-based. USGS warehouses hold vast amounts of analog materials, such as manuscripts and film negatives, used to create these maps. Since 2009, the fully digital US Topo maps are produced with GIS software. The 2022 release of topoBuilder enables users to create on-demand custom maps anywhere in the U.S. and its territories with the latest available data from The National Map. Despite the obsolescence of these historical mapping records after the digital transition, we explore their value and efforts for long-term preservation in the National Archives.

USGS OnDemand Topos: How Product Requirements Shape the Design of a Topographic Map Product Catalog
Bethany Walker, U.S. Geological Survey
In 2022 the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Geospatial Program launched topoBuilder, a web-based application which allows users to request and customize topographic maps, referred to as OnDemand Topos. TopoBuilder initially offered a 1:24,000-scale map, called 7.5-Minute Topo. Today, there are four product configurations available, with scales ranging from 1:24,000 to 1:250,000. OnDemand Topos are designed using ArcGIS Pro and integrated into topoBuilder using Esri’s Topographic Production Service. This presentation overviews the OnDemand Topo design process and goals for future OnDemand Topo products.

Unlocking Possibilities With Open Map Data
Jessica Acosta Rodriguez, Esri
The future of open map data is supported by accessible, interoperable, high-quality datasets that fuel innovation and collaboration across industries and communities. As the demand for this data grows, organizations like Esri are advancing this vision through partnerships with the Overture Maps Foundation. By integrating open data from different sources, Overture delivers curated, schema-consistent, and quality-assured datasets, offering a reliable foundation for GIS professionals. In this presentation, you will learn how Esri is leveraging Overture’s data through different basemap products, as well as how you can contribute and have access to this data —unlocking new possibilities for open, creative, and collaborative cartography.

Spatially Optimized Parquet
Matt George, Esri
Jeremy Bartley
Parquet has become the standard for large-scale data analytics, and with GeoParquet and native spatial types, it's quickly becoming the core format for the next generation of spatial query engines. However, visualizing this data on the web typically requires standing up servers in front of the data or converting to other formats like Vector Tiles. Come learn about the new open Spatially Optimized Parquet format, which combines XZ spatial clustering with multiscale quantization. Web clients read Parquet files directly, streaming datasets with billions of features on the web.

galleryofpossibilities: A QGIS plugin for feminist map icons
Meghan Kelly, Syracuse University
Feminist Mapping Collective at Syracuse University
Map icons are tiny, space saving symbols that embed meaning and locate people, places, and stories. Map icons, however, are not “one-size-fits-all” and they (along with their libraries) have been re-envisioned through a feminist lens. The galleryofpossibilities is a map icon digital library seeded by feminist map icons for the city of Boston designed during community-based workshops. Here, the Feminist Mapping Collective officially launches the galleryofpossibilities as a publicly available QGIS plugin showcasing the tools’ features and functionality, feminist development process, research impacts, and future extensions.

You Already Know the Hard Part: Publishing Your Maps with MapLibre
Stephanie May
You already know the hard part of making a map. What's stopping you from building your own web maps is a handful of small, learnable gaps, the ones you keep meaning to get to. Right? Good news. This talk decodes the web mapping stack (data, tiles, styles, hosting) and shows how MapLibre ties them together, so the parts you already know can click into place. We'll make room for questions you've never found the right space to ask out loud. You'll leave with a galaxy brain, ready to dust off an old project or start a new one.

Curating the Pinhead map icon library
Quincy Morgan, Wayside Mapping
Pinhead (https://pinhead.ink) is a next-generation collaborative library of thousands of public domain map icons. Seeded from common icon sources like Maki, Temaki, and NPS, Pinhead brings a standard design language to classic pictograms while adding hundreds of newly drawn symbols and variants. This talk will cover the curation decisions behind the Pinhead library and show attendees how to use Pinhead in their own projects.

Mapping as Close Reading: Visualizing Abolition Geographies in Speculative Fiction
brianna sas-pérez, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
What if we use mapping, not just text, to represent findings from a close reading? I experiment with this methodological question through a counter-mapping of the Robledo neighborhood in Octavia Butler's (1993) Parable of the Sower. Thinking with abolition geography and Gilmore's "freedom as a place" (2017), I treat Butler's imagination and fictional worlds as cartographic data. Using layered, hand-drawn mapping techniques, I make visible how communities create safety through everyday spatial practice.

Other Worlds Are Possible: Fantasy world building as the basis for imagining hopeful futures in the classroom
Christopher Fowler, Penn State University
Students increasingly treat higher education as credentialing, while the wider culture struggles to imagine futures meaningfully better than the present. This talk argues that cartographic world building — the disciplined invention of physical geographies, climates, hydrologies, settlement systems, and trade networks for places that do not exist — offers a generative response to both crises. Drawing on EART-H, a procedurally modeled fantasy world built in R and deployed as an open Quarto book and tabletop campaign, I show how making maps for impossible places trains students to treat institutions as contingent, place-specific, and genuinely revisable.

Toward a Mapping of the Superhero Genre
James Tyner, Department of Geography, Kent State University
Metropolis. Gotham City. Hell’s Kitchen. Wakanda. For some people, these places hold little or no meaning. But for those invested in the superhero genre, these names conjure images of heroic exploits where superpowered characters do battle with other superpowered characters. Similar to other genre, the superhero genre is intimately place bound and several characters manifest a profound place-attachment. In this presentation I provide some tentative first steps. First, I provide a broad overview of maps in the superhero genre. Second, I provide a framework for a narrative mapping of superhero narratives, with special attention directed toward a mainstay of the genre, that is the hero’s journey.

Evaluating Research on the History of Maps in Mysteries
Judith Tyner, Professor emerita, California State University, Long Beach
Maps have been included in mystery novels for over 100 years and yet there has been little analysis of them. Chapters in books on maps in literature often ignore mystery fiction or discuss one or two authors, mostly from the ‘golden age’; some articles list books that contain maps, but there is no real history or analysis of the maps or even identification of their makers. Articles talk about which books contain maps, and often equate floor plans with maps, they do not discuss the style of the maps or their authors. In this presentation I look at the literature of maps in mystery fiction, examine and evaluate this research.

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.

AI, Artistic Style, and Intellectual Property: Legal and Ethical Boundaries in Modern Cartography
Aileen Buckley, Esri
Pete Schreiber, Esri
The capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) to replicate artistic style is a hallmark of modern advances in deep learning, machine learning, and generative AI. But it also raises concerns about copying artistic style that predate AI and have long been relevant to cartographers and other artists. At the heart of this discussion is the argument that cartography = art = protectable copyright expression. Several legal principles are central to this discussion, including the idea/expression dichotomy, the protection of artistic forms, the copyrightability of fact-based works, and the copyrightability of “style.” In a world that is being scraped, ingested, and consumed by AI, and AI increasingly automates map creation, mimics styles, and arranges facts in novel ways, understanding these legal boundaries is essential for the ethical and innovative use of AI in cartography.

Cartographic Frameworks Should Inform AI Best Practices
Vanessa Knoppke-Wetzel, Esri
In our industry we should not ignore the unprecedented impact AI on the world at multiple scales, such as environmental destruction and inaccurate code, data, maps, and visualizations.
Our existing cartographic frameworks and collective expertise can inform, push, and grow the industry and our work to ensure that if AI is part of our tools, products, software, production methodology, and/or more... we know that we are doing the most to have the least negative impact.
Join my talk to learn how to start.
I also hope this talk encourages us to come together and collectively improve AI best practices over time.

GeoAI Embracing Place? Earth Embeddings and The Pitfall of Digital Placelessness
Yue Lin, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Bo Zhao, University of Washington (not presenting)
Earth embeddings, learned as numerical vectors from Earth observation (EO) data, are increasingly promoted as enabling GeoAI to embrace place by representing spatial complexity in dense, multi-dimensional form. This paper questions the promise and argues that Earth embeddings embody a design paradox: their current modes can intensify what we term digital placelessness—the reduction of places to computable surfaces that sidelines relational, social, cultural, and historical dimensions of place. Empirically, we examine Google’s Satellite Embedding dataset in the San Diego-Tijuana border region, where shared terrain and built form coexist with sharply different sovereignties, regimes of exclusion, and lived realities. We show how embedding-based similarity renders cross-border places "similar" by privileging EO-visible landscape while obscuring the political and experiential asymmetries. We further argue that embeddings add a post-visual layer of abstraction relative to satellite imagery and sensor measurements, which can weaken interpretive accountability and constrain the shared representational ground often needed for community-engaged geographic inquiry. We conclude by outlining directions for re-situating Earth embeddings through boundary-setting, plural representations, and provenance-aware evaluation, and we invite geographers to rethink what it would mean for GeoAI to embrace place without collapsing place into surface, proxy, and vector similarity.

All you need are words: LLMs and the future of prompt-driven cartography
Ian Muehlenhaus, Esri
Maps used to be expensive: technically, temporally, and institutionally. With large language models, they’ve become incredibly cheap. This talk introduces “prompt cartography,” where the cartographer shifts from map maker to map director – guiding expert assistants through iterative pipelines of data, design, and critique. Rather than replacing expertise, this shift amplifies it, demanding sharper judgment, clearer intent, and new forms of authorship and collaboration. I’ll outline emerging prompt-to-map workflows, common failure modes, and what this means in everyday practice, teaching, and for the future of the field. The goal isn’t to fear inevitable change; it's to ensure today's cartographers help direct it.

Can AI Reason with Cartographic Rules? A Framework for Evaluating LLM-Based Cartographic Decision-Making
Shiyu Zhang, University of Oregon
Generative AI is increasingly being applied to cartographic tasks, yet most current approaches treat map production as a pattern-matching task, offering little insight into whether AI decision-making aligns with cartographic principles. This talk presents a framework for evaluating LLM-based cartographic decision-making. Using the International Specification for Orienteering Maps as an application domain, the study designs a baseline cartographic agent with a traceable reasoning workflow. It then examines how different ways of organizing cartographic knowledge shape reasoning behavior and failure patterns.

A Cartographic Analysis of Renewable Energy Maps
Sarah Haedrich, University of Oregon
How is the development of renewable energy imagined? Where are renewable energy facilities actually located, and how are those decisions made? What role do maps play in these development processes? In this presentation, I will explore these questions through a case study of utility-scale solar and wind development in Oregon. I will present findings from a content analysis of maps depicting solar and wind development, followed by preliminary findings from interviews with renewable energy development stakeholders.

FERNS Pesticide Notification Web Map Development
Joanna Merson, University of Oregon InfoGraphics Lab
Erik Steiner, University of Oregon InfoGraphics Lab
Mason Leavitt, Beyond Toxics
Michal Klopotowski, University of Oregon InfoGraphics Lab
Oregon has one of the nation's most comprehensive public notification systems for planned pesticide applications on forestlands. However, notifications are available as individual PDFs, making access and geographic exploration difficult. In collaboration with Beyond Toxics, an environmental justice nonprofit based in OR, we developed an interactive map that makes pesticide notifications (2014-2024) easier to explore. The presentation focuses on design choices that improve access through interactive mapping, filters, and original source links while communicating data limitations. Public response has been mixed: supporters praise the map for increasing transparency and public access to environmental information,

Hidden Hybrids in the Huayhuash: Public/Private Property Mapping in Perú
Timothy Norris, University of Miami
In 2002 the Cordilleras Huayhuash and Raura of the central Peruvian Andes were designated as the Zona Reservada Cordillera Huayhuash (ZRCH). Shortly after this state led initiative, local communities leveraged novel private conservation frameworks to have their lands recognized as private conservation areas (PCAs). This hybrid public/private conservation strategy is remarkably successful to date. I tell a cartographic story of these efforts and argue that the benefits of the PCAs are hidden from the state and that the benefits of the ZRCH are hidden from the communities. These hidden benefits present an opportunity in which maps can reveal these emergent hybrid conceptions of property and the impact they have on the socionatural landscape.

Mapping the Natlas: Cartography for Conservation in Vermont
Bernadette Osborn, Middlebury College
As a geospatial intern with The Nature Conservancy in Vermont, I designed 16 hiking maps for the "Natlas," a collection of Natural Area maps built to serve hikers, hunters, stewardship staff, and TNC as a whole. Using Google Earth Engine, ArcGIS, QGIS, and Adobe Illustrator, I created maps that layer natural communities, topography, and hydrology into clear, field-ready references. This talk walks through my workflow, from data processing to final design, and the choices made to balance public accessibility with the technical needs of land stewards. I'll share lessons learned building multi-use conservation maps for a diverse, non-cartographer audience.

Natural areas cartography: If you like it, should you put a ring on it?
Jovian Sackett, Southern Environmental Law Center
While natural areas, like wetlands, rarely possess crisp boundaries, legal determinations often require them. Wetlands are complex and dynamic systems, regulated to varying degrees, making them specifically challenging to represent. Cartography is a valuable communications tool for environmental advocacy and educational applications, but a critical one for informing decision makers like judges, legislators and environmental agency leaders on jurisdictional matters about wetlands areas. Cartographers must author maps that respect data limitations, without leaving readers confused or misled. The balance lies somewhere between the unmistakable starkness of a bold, singular line and the indecipherable haze of a gradient, where clarity and complexity meet.