North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) 2022

I recently had the great fortune of attending the North American Cartographic Information Society’s (NACIS) 2022 Annual Meeting and Practical Cartography Day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and wanted to share some highlights.

Presentations

Below are recaps from a few of the presentations.

Ungrading for Cartography by Heather Rosenfeld at Smith College

Heather believes that by utilizing a traditional grading system in a cartography class, students are more motivated to receive a grade rather than motivated to learn the material. She explains ungrading as a system that doesn’t lack grades, it’s just a different system altogether where relative and normative feedback is given. Students are also asked to review their own work, and the work of their peers, which breeds metacognition in the students. This also promotes technical community care, where students are more willing to help each other when they have software questions.

Heather supplemented her presentation with a visual handout, which I’m linking here.

Yet Another New Design for an Old Map by Kenneth Field at Esri

Ken was truly a pleasure to listen to. He was a charismatic storyteller that absolutely loves the iconic original London Underground map. In fact, he has it tattooed on his arm. As time progresses, new lines are added, the map is poorly updated and he’s finally had enough. He hates the latest map redesign, which was initiated because of the addition of the Elizabeth line. He didn’t share his slides with us, but I found this blog post which was essentially his presentation. In the end, he redesigns the map himself and talks about his process.

I Can’t Get No Relief: Mapping Flat Places by Daniel Coe, Washington Geological Survey

This was a really impressive presentation. He shared his slides with presenter notes, so please enjoy. If you choose to only open one link from this entire blog post, make it this one.

I Want to Be a Cartographer When I Grow Up! by Kate Leroux at Stamen Design

This was just a fun presentation about Cartographers in video games. She breaks it down into several stats including the cartographers’ demographics, whether or not they wore glasses, etc. A copy of the slides from her presentation can be found here.

An Inventory of Martian Hypometric Tints by Daniel P. Huffman at somethingaboutmaps

Daniel has a hobby of creating beautiful tinting schemes that he applied to the planet of Mars. I took pictures of his slides, but his WordPress site does the colors much more justice.

Cartography & the Golden Ratio by Eric Rodenbeck at Stamen Design

Eric presented how using the Golden Ratio will give you the best samples, rather than using the “grid” or “random” options. I wish he shared the slides from his presentation because his explanation really made sense. However, he did share his code for it.

Map Gallery

Of course, there was a map gallery, including a student map competition. The first one pictured below was the winner, and the rest were just neat maps I thought were worth sharing.