NACIS 2016

Mapping the Monolithic Statue Quarries of Easter Island (Rapa Nui)
Alice Hom, Easter Island Statue Project (EISP)
Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Easter Island Statue Project (EISP)
Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, Easter Island Statue Project (EISP)
Matthew Bates, Easter Island Statue Project (EISP)
Eastern Polynesian figurative carving traditions developed on Rapa Nui into a distinctive body of monolithic stone sculpture (moai). About half of all moai remain embedded in the bedrock of a centralized quarry established within a unique volcanic feature named Rano Raraku. This presentation describes the production of an illustrated archaeological atlas of Rano Raraku moai based upon extensive archaeological field survey, statue excavation, photogrammetry, illustrative cartography, and cross-references to archival documentation. Relationships between the quarry and ceremonial sites across the island are visually presented through spatial analysis. We examine chronologies which reveal the consequences human use in Rano Raraku, and the challenges of organizing data for reinterpreting the past while planning for the future of moai conservation and further research.

Saving Tigers - One Map at a Time!
Kevin McManigal, University of Montana
A unique partnership between the University of Montana Department of Geography and the Panthera large cat conservation organization has been producing high resolution topographic maps of the Parsa Wildlife Reserve in Nepal and the Manas National Park in India. Twelve student cartographers have worked for the last 2 years to create over 24 topographic maps that cover both parks. They are being utilized in the field by anti-poaching patrols as part of the Tigers Forever program. The maps have the potential to literally change the family trees of the park's tigers. This presentation will delve into the entire workflow from data creation and digitizing in GIS, to styling of the maps in Illustrator, and training the park rangers in the jungle with the finished maps. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the challenges and successes while mentoring aspiring cartography students through a project of this scope and size.

Maps for sustainable tourism for Pennsylvania's craft beer and wine industries
Alison Feeney, Shippensburg University
Map can greatly influence a person's perception of an area and they should be a logical tool for planning a trip. While tourism maps can be a blatant form of advertising they assist in generating knowledge and an impression of the destination. Sustainable tourism is experiencing remarkable growth, particularly with the movement of the local traveler, triggered by people's desires to eat and drink. Promoting local breweries and wineries helps to create a direct link to the community. Recently, the number of craft breweries and wineries in Pennsylvania has exploded, contributing greatly to the state's economy. This paper will use content analysis to examine maps generated for Pennsylvania's craft beer and wine tourism industries in both paper and digital form. The goal is to identify common themes and marketing techniques that can be applied to generate a sustainable map for the Colchagua wine region of Chile.

Reflections on Five Years of Teaching Cartography
Robert Roth, UW-Madison
Cartography has changed, is changing, and always will be changing. Arguably, cartography's innate state of flux is what makes our profession both unique and valuable: as we engage in the design process, we tinker, adlib, and innovate across a wide array of tools and techniques. Yet, this creative and rapid adaptation does not always translate well to instruction. In this presentation, I discuss my anecdotal experiences over the past five years to restructure the cartography curriculum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in order to adapt to sweeping shifts in conceptual framings, web mapping technologies, and professional expectations. I discuss the pedagogical philosophy guiding the revised curriculum, the reorganization of design concepts and technical skills approached in each course to account for the changing profession, and lessons learned for keeping curriculum malleable as cartography continues to evolve conceptually and technologically. The presentation is pitched to educators, students, and industry leaders.
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Teaching New Cartography
Rich Donohue, New Maps Plus, University of Kentucky, Department of Geography
Andy Eschbacher, CARTO
New mapping tools and needs continue to converge, producing stunning ways of visualizing data and gaining insights. Both industry and the academy are eager to embrace these emerging trends. Yet the challenge remains how to provide sufficient education and training to a growing population of mappers, as well as how to keep these materials current and useful. This talk explores mapping education from two complementary perspectives. CartoDB stands at the forefront of integrating frontend tools like D3 and Leaflet with backend services supported by PostGIS, enabling a web-based solution to traditional desktop GIS processes. New Maps Plus (U of Kentucky Department of Geography) blends the skills required to harness the web platform with traditional cartographic education.
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From button pushing to problem solving: modern geospatial technology in the classroom
Lyzi Diamond, Mapbox
The world of mapping technology moves fast. Even cartographers in industry have trouble keeping up with the newest trends in geospatial software, libraries, and programming languages. This presents a nontrivial problem for instructors in higher education: students want to be prepared for jobs after college, which means they want to learn the latest and greatest tools. How are teachers supposed to keep up? In this talk, I will present some ideas on how instructors can help students stay on the bleeding edge of geospatial technology without putting in hundreds of extra hours. The talk will factor in perspectives from industry while focusing on the real challenges of working in an academic environment, using real world examples from a university that is overhauling its geospatial technology program this year.
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Cartographic Curiosity: Promoting Interdisciplinary Thinking in General Education through Maps
Joy Santee, McKendree University
This presentation reports how introduction of cartography in general education courses can help university students combat limits of subject-specific thinking and embrace complex interdisciplinary critical thought. In an age where students often resist complex thinking in favor of finding answers through a quick search on their phones, introducing them to maps and cartographic practices can prompt social awareness, problem-solving skills, and citizen-engagement. The presentation begins with a brief overview of how the presenter has introduced cartography in general education courses after developing materials during a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar. It continues with vignettes of student engagement with maps and ends with a call for cartographers to make their work visible, particularly their decisions about design and content and the social and institutional contexts that impact map-making, so students can use cartography as a way to identify how they can contribute to making the world a better place.
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Women Shaping the World: Women and Globes
Judith Tyner Geography Dept., CSU Long Beach
Globes today are looked at as toys or teaching aids for the elementary schools or as decorative objects for the home. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, globes were scientific instruments and while they were used in schools they were used to teach mathematical or astronomical geography; they were not mere toys. While the history of women in cartography has only recently begun to be studied, women's contributions to the creation of globes have been almost totally ignored. Yet women have been involved in globe making since at least the 18th century, there have been at least nine U.S. patents for globes and tellurians granted to women and globes were edited and sold by women. This paper looks at the history of women in globe making and at some specific women and their globes.
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The First Geologic Maps of the U.S.
John Lindemann, Consulting Geologist
In 1809 William Maclure - one of the first American geologists - published what is arguably the first geologic map of the United States. Over the next three decades this map, little changed with the exception of its topographic base, was republished in four iterations. To the modern earth science community these maps are largely unknown. What caused these seemingly pioneer maps to slip into near obscurity?
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Geohistory-Géohistoire Canada: Developing a partnership for historical GIS and mapping in Canada
Byron Moldofsky, GIS and Cartography Office, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto
Marcel Fortin, Map and Data Library, University of Toronto
The Canadian Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS) Partnership Development Project is a diverse group of geographers, historians, librarians, research NGOs, GIS companies, and members of the public. We are working to improve our collective ability to research historical subjects using GIS, and map them, primarily on the web. We are reaching out to the larger HGIS community to consolidate knowledge about what kinds of resources are currently available, and what will be needed in the future - not only to build historical GIS data and tools, but also to facilitate collaboration and data-sharing. In the first year of this two-year project we are laying the groundwork by reviewing current capabilities and needs, including doing a user needs survey for HGIS web-mapping. This presentation will present preliminary results from this study, and will discuss plans for pilot projects in the coming year.
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Historical Geocoding and the City - 10 Minute Talk
Michael Page, Emory University
Matthew Pierce, Emory University
Alan Pike, Emory University
Jason Yang, Emory University
The Digital Lab of Emory's Center for Digital Scholarship produced a 3D geodatabase and geocoder of circa 1930's Atlanta, Georgia as part of its Atlanta Explorer Project which seeks to transform city directories and historical spatial data into geospatial tools and immersive visualizations for exploring the history of the city. This presentation discusses the methods used and lessons learned from the first phase of the project and how it has informed our strategy to produce geocoders for the years 1867-1930.
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Indoor Navigation and the Role of Maps
Georg Gartner, Technische Universität Wien, Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation
As long as people need to decide where to go and how to get there, navigation will remain one of the fundamental problems in human cognition, wayfinding and geospatial research. Over the past several decades, navigation applications have increasingly conquered the world with online mapping services, car navigation systems and ubiquitous smartphone distribution. Lately, more and more Location-Based Services and mobile applications play a crucial role in our daily life as these help positioning, wayfinding and sharing of information. Currently, outdoor car navigation implementations are quite well-advanced and mature. Indoor navigation applications on the other hand have so far proven more challenging, even though the last decade showed significant progress in for example improved indoor localization techniques, standardization of indoor models and public indoor data gathering efforts. In this contribution several concepts for indoor navigation services are discussed and some developments towards deriving indoor landmarks and appropriate cartographic models highlighted.

Deemphasising Dead-ends: Navigation in Today's Dendritic Cities
Nate Wessel, University of Toronto
Algorithmic detection of dead-ends and highly indirect streets could help cartographers reduce visual noise in transport maps, without resort to generalization techniques that simplify data or remove it entirely. In this presentation, I'll discuss algorithms for detecting dead-ends and apply them to a sample of regions, using OpenStreetMap data. I'll attempt to show how the resulting classification can be used to reduce visual noise and make maps easier for the eye to navigate. Preliminary results show that dead-ends make up between 12% and 45% of all streets and/or paths in my broad sample of regions, and can depend in varying degrees on the chosen transport mode for which the network is constructed. The proposed technique then has special relevance for mode-specific transport maps or maps for users with unique access constraints.
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Virtual Reality and Mapping: An Introduction to Matterport
Derek Tonn, mapformation, LLC
The long-rumored arrival of virtual reality, in a commercially-viable sense, seems to finally be here. And its impacts upon map creation and wayfinding could be profound. No longer forcing end users of the wayfinding resources we develop (of which map illustration is but one) to understand the world in the one way we've visually presented it to them, virtual reality solutions are marrying planimetric and oblique/pictorial illustration with panoramic photography and the ability to freely move within a place. This session will introduce attendees to one VR-compatible solution I've become intimately familiar with over the past eighteen months: Matterport (https://matterport.com/try/). I will also share examples of how our mapping firm has been utilizing the technology.

Using network segments in the spatial representation of travel time isochrones
Jeff Allen, University of Toronto
Steven Farber, University of Toronto Scarborough
Isochrones are often used for visual analysis of mobility and accessibility in urban areas. We will discuss an alternative method to conventional isochrones; using computed travel times to classify network segments rather than generating isolines or polygons. We will outline the data, tools, and geoprocessing steps required to make these kind of maps as well as discuss visualization considerations for different scales, subject matter, and for static and interactive maps. Further discussion will include their advantages and disadvantages when compared to conventional isochrones, particularly in terms of classification options and mapping in conjunction with other data. Finally, we will comment on how this method results in potential benefits for subsequent spatial analysis and how it can be scaled for multiple origin points, travel modes, departure times, and transit scenarios.
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Husky Lines Mobile App: Adapting transportation studies to our changing technologies
Elisabeth Leaf, University of Washington, Urban Studies
Britta Ricker, Ph.D. University of Washington
Alexa Brockamp, University of Washington
The Husky Lines research project takes a mixed methods approach to identifying barriers to public transit usage for the student population of the Tacoma campus of the University of Washington. The first step was to illuminate existing public transit deserts and simultaneously implement a student survey to measure student perceptions of transit use. Based on these findings, the team is recommending new bus stops and bus lines to better serve the student population in an effort to increase usage of public transportation by the students. Taking this approach a step further, this specific study aims to collect perceptions of daily commute and actual daily commute patterns. A mobile application, tapping into built-in sensors, measures actual commute patterns and is augmented with a traditional travel diary to measure perception of commutes. Finally, this study provides an example of how mobile technology can be used to support transportation surveys.
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Mapping Air Population
Michael Peterson, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Paul Hunt, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Air population refers to the total number of people flying above the earth at any point in time. These people form a distinct and separate population from those still physically connected to earth. Real-time air population can be estimated by using an extensive network of ground aircraft sensors based on ADS-B (Automated Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast). An aircraft determines its position via GPS and broadcasts its position along with its identification, aircraft type, altitude and speed. Most commercial passenger aircraft are equipped with ADS-B transponders. The total number of passengers is calculated by multiplying the number of seats for each aircraft by the current seat occupancy rate. Using this method, the estimated air population is determined for the contiguous airspace over the United States. The air population is further divided by each state. In the interactive, real-time mapping system, maps are provided to show total state air population and the density of air population.
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Mapping Real-Time Flight Data - 10 Minute Talk
Paul Hunt, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Michael Peterson, University of Nebraska at Omaha
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) tracks flights through a combination of flight plans and radar. This data is publicly available through subscription to the FAA's National Aerospace System (NAS). Live flight data can be acquired by requesting access and connecting through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) into the FAA System Wide Information Management (SWIM).  This daunting process requires security and hardware infrastructure and heavy coordination with FAA liaisons. Alternatively, many private companies, such as FlightAware, are already connected to SWIM and augment this information with a network of ground stations that acquire ADS-B signals from airplanes. A cloud-based system is demonstrated for mapping this data in real-time using a series of JavaScript AJAX requests. The requests return geographically referenced JavaScript Object Notation (GeoJSON) data that is mapped on-the-fly using web-based mapping APIs. The data is further analyzed to determine the number and type of planes flying above each US state.

Using Historical Maps to Research Pittsburgh's Bridges
Todd Wilson, GAI Consultants
Lauren Winkler, Michael Baker International
Pittsburgh, the City of Bridges, is also known for its convoluted roads. Some streets intersect each other three times. Others change names a few times. Giving directions, one often says, "Not that right, the other right," or "Go straight," which means angle left. The development of the city's roads is linked to the development of the city's bridges. In writing the book, Images of America Pittsburgh's Bridges, published in 2015, the study of historical maps became a key research tool. Maps revealed bridges that were eliminated when valleys were filled in and streets that were rearranged when new bridges were built. This research showed that by going back far enough in time, there was an explanation for each irregularity. This presentation will show these findings through maps and images past and present, explaining the city's inconsistencies and abnormalities that make it unique.

A GIS Map Application for Location Selection and People's Preferences for Establishing Schools in Al Ain City, UAE
Naeema Al Hosani, United Arab Emirates University
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) constructing thematic maps describing a variety of information relating to development activities. Current research examined the potential of suitable location as well as to study peoples' preferences to locate best sites for establishing schools in the city of Al Ain. The city of Al Ain has seen rapid developments, specially, in terms of expansion and population growth that, numerically, unprecedented. Therefore, this study aims to determine suitable models to establish the distribution of schools. The study came with some results about the problems that the education services suffer in the area of study. The study concluded that the distribution of the schools were not evenly distributed, therefore, this study recommends to cooperate with the relevant authorities and the ministries that are concerned with the development of education services.

Minnesota Smart City/Infrastructure Transparency Stress Tool
Katie Stinebaugh, University of Minnesota
In his March 2015 Last Week Tonight episode dedicated to infrastructure, John Oliver confronted us with this reality: We only seem to talk about infrastructure when something tragic happens. Conversations about infrastructure are easy to avoid when we bury public information in long reports across multiple agencies. As cartographers and GIS professionals, we are often called to bring together disparate data sources, break them out of their tabular cells, and create simple, attractive tools for communication. The Minnesota Smart City/Infrastructure Transparency Stress Tool is such a project. This is a living collection of web maps and associated visualizations of infrastructure quantity, age, need, and spending for Minnesota's 800+ cities using existing data from several state agencies.  These maps provide an approachable tool for the public, legislators, city officials, and other stakeholders to change conversations about Minnesota's present and future infrastructure.

OpenStreetMap Analytics: Rewarding Contributors by Tracking OSM in Real-Time
Dylan Moriarty, Develpoment Seed
Marc Farra, Develpoment Seed
Nate Smith, Development Seed
Mapathons are an increasingly effective way to get data into OpenStreetMap. The Missing Maps project hosts mapathons to increase the amount of data in areas that don't have large local OSM communities. Using the OSM tasking manager and data from Missing Maps, the American Red Cross built an analytics platform that tracks user trends in real-time and rewards contributors for their efforts. This talk will explore the design challenges inherit in the scale of an OSM project, and how we handled developing an architecture that needs to reliably handle bursts of data during high periods of activity, yet reducing costs by auto scaling to input as required.

Taxis and APIs: Mapping and Analyzing Transportation in New York City
Juan Francisco Saldarriaga, Columbia University
David A. King, Arizona State University
Taxicabs are a critical aspect of the public transit system in New York City. The yellow cabs that are ubiquitous in Manhattan are as iconic as the city's subway system, and in recent years green taxicabs have been introduced by the city to improve taxi service. In this talk we will present two projects that map and analyze taxi data. The first one looks at cash versus credit card payments and analyzes their spatial distribution in relation to the unbanked population of the city. The second project attempts to quantify how much do green cabs have to travel empty before they can pickup another passenger, and maps their travels using multiple routing APIs. This project analyzes transportation policies while also reflecting upon the tools we use to perform our analysis; it is as much about the tools as about the content.
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Taking it Public: Visualizing Geospatial Data on the Web Using Shiny
Jerry Shannon, University of Georgia
Kyle Walker, Texas Christian University
Julia Connell, University of Georgia
Governmental and non-profit institutions have increasingly created data dashboards based on open datasets to increase transparency and encourage citizen participation. Two limitations have hampered these efforts. First, raw datasets are often complex and difficult to decipher for non-specialists. Second, software to visualize trends within the data is expensive. For several of these systems, tools specifically for geovisualization are underdeveloped. In this presentation, we describe how Shiny, a data visualization system developed by RStudio, provides solutions to both issues. Shiny harnesses a variety of existing tools such as Leaflet, Plotly, and Highcharts, and encourages users to interact and explore datasets.  As it runs on the free and open source R software, Shiny's cost is also minimal.  We use two case studies to describe how Shiny provides an accessible way to facilitate data exploration for public audiences.
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Where Do We Put It All? Lessons Learned Housing Large Geospatial Data Collections In OCUL's Scholars GeoPortal
Jo Ashley, OCUL Scholars Portal, University of Toronto Libraries
Amber Leahey, OCUL Scholars Portal, University of Toronto Libraries
The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is a consortium of twenty-one university libraries in the province of Ontario, Canada that collaborates through collective purchasing and shared digital library infrastructure. OCUL's Scholars GeoPortal service (geo.scholarsportal.info) uses Esri software to provide a set of online tools for identifying, exploring, and downloading licensed geospatial datasets for academic research in Ontario. Since 2012, the usage and size of geospatial data collections housed and showcased in Scholars GeoPortal has grown significantly, with more than 220,000 site visits and over 140TB of data, resulting in a number of challenges. This session will introduce the GeoPortal's interface and discuss various data related issues and demands facing the current version of the geoportal, lessons learned, as well as future ideas and plans for continued success.
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Mapping Virtual Traffic in Real Space and Time - 10 Minute Talk
Ryan Mullins Aptima, Inc.
Caroline Ziemkiewicz, Aptima, Inc.
Adam Fouse, Aptima, Inc.
Computer networks are essential to modern communication. Understanding the logical and spatiotemporal connections of these networks is an essential requirement for those ensuring information availability, integrity, and confidentiality. Past network visualizations have, generally, focused on representing either their logical structure or physical location. Approaches to the former typically involve node-link diagrams, which offer utility for small networks but fail when scaled to the complexities of large modern networks. Approaches to the latter effectively communicate where networked assets are, but place significant cognitive load on the human figure out how and how quickly information will get there. In this presentation, we present a novel network visualization concept which combines approaches from traffic mapping and node-link diagrams to show the minimum time to communicate between network nodes. Additionally, we present some initial findings from a usability analysis that sheds some light on the important geographic attributes for network visualizations.
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The National Atlas of Korea: Rare opportunities for cartographic and geographic education
Gregory Chu, Univ. of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Chulsue Hwang, Kyung Hee University
Jongnam Choi, Western Illinois University
The 2014 National Atlas of Korea is one of the most advanced and well designed national atlases of all of Asia. It serves an innovative role in the design and contents for any national atlas in multiple aspects: data selection and portrayal, integration of media and maps, providing pedagogy, and unrestricted online access. Published by the National Geographic Information Institute, maps highlight multiple decades of a massive Spatial Planning effort. With data contributions from most government agencies at national and local levels, the Atlas integrates aspects of socioeconomic, political, educational, demographic, and environmental data that harmonized with national development. Produced by South Korea government, the Atlas also integrates rare but accurate data about demographic, economic, urban, and migration attributes of North Korea. The Atlas is a tremendously valuable resource for teaching about Korea. Several freely downloadable lesson plans were developed for use by American secondary school teachers.

The Lake Champlain Basin Atlas: An Online Portal to Watershed Exploration and Education
Ryan Mitchell, Lake Champlain Basin Program
Originally developed in 2002 using static PDF maps, the online Lake Champlain Basin Atlas is one of the Lake Champlain Basin Program's (LCBP) most effective education and outreach tools. The atlas includes standard themes as well as content focused on management issues specific to the Lake Champlain watershed. It is used extensively by students and educators as a source for research and for mapping exercises. The LCBP is redeveloping the atlas using contemporary web mapping tools, both open source and proprietary. With links to the source data and to ArcGIS Online feature layers, the new atlas will be a portal to exploration of the watershed and a point of departure for mapping activities that use modern tools and techniques. I will discuss the redevelopment of the atlas and its use in LCBP E&O efforts, and explore additional educational applications and the role of atlases in education in the digital age.
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Implementing a new geospatial data discovery interface across a multi-institution consortium
Nathan Piekielek, The Pennsylvania State University
James Whitacre, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Geographic information systems (GIS) have been commonly used mapping and analytic tools for more than twenty years. Early in this period, a lack of geospatial data often limited GIS users so that individuals were commonly producing geospatial data for their own use. More recently, the availability of geospatial data has increased dramatically so that the focus has shifted away from the data production efforts of individuals and towards large-scale multi-institution data documentation and discovery projects. In 2015, nine university members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC; aka Big Ten) began a collaborative effort to build and populate a geospatial data portal. The portal leverages the newest data documentation and discovery tools including GeoNetwork to create ISO metadata records and GeoBlacklight as the platform for a web-based discovery interface. A beta version of the portal is operational and will be described and demonstrated.
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GIS-based Discovery Interface to Paper Map Sets - 10 Minute Talk
Christopher Thiry, Colorado School of Mines  
The staff of the Map Collection at the Arthur Lakes Library, Colorado School of Mines has created a new and unique way that provides access to its international paper map sets. The GIS -based Discovery Interface Project has created a visual, interactive, searchable, web-based portal that provides patrons with an easy way to understand what maps are owned by the Library, and how to access them. Embedded within the interface are links to records in the Library’s catalog, and, when available, links to scanned copies of the maps. These interfaces have allowed patrons, from afar, to easily search our map holdings, and quickly understand what is available. Also, two of the websites created for this project are discovery tools for scanned maps. The processes developed by the Map Collection’s staff are the start of a crowd-sharing effort that will allow other libraries to easily create their own discovery portal and thus provide access to their map collection. The staff has written clear instructions on how to recreate this project, and made the plain copies of individual indexes available for all to use. This project has stripped away the layers of library jargon that often interfere with patrons finding the information they need. The interfaces leave behind problems of language and library terms, and even the confusion of using a library’s catalog.  Usually, patrons know exactly what part of the globe they are searching for; these portals take the user right to their area of interest and shows what paper maps are available.

iPad Apps for Teaching Geography - 10 Minute Talk
Abdullah Al-Zubaidi, United Arab Emirates University
Naeema al Hosani, United Arab Emirates University 
With the information technology revolution geography teachers are looking for different innovative ways to teach geography and keep students involved by providing them with an immersive digital experience, and using many of the online tools that are available nowadays. One of the very useful devices for teaching and learning is iPad. The aim of this study is to investigate at different iPad apps, which can be used as some of the most engaging online tools for teaching geography to students of all ages. Results indicated that these apps provide a number of stimulating games, quizzes, and some other materials that can possibly bring life to geography learning. It is concluded that using apps in teaching geography provides interactive content to engage students and keep them motivated, and they perform better.