Name: Practical Cartography Day Late Morning Session
Start: 2015-10-14T10:30:00-0500
End: 2015-10-14T12:00:00-0500

Welcome to NACIS 2015 in Minneapolis! This is the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). The theme for this year’s meeting is Mapping Interactions. See the schedule below and go to the NACIS website for more details.

The North American Cartographic Information Society, founded in 1980, is an organization comprised of specialists from private, academic, and government organizations whose common interest lies in facilitating communication in the map information community.

For those of you who were unable to attend the conference, or who couldn’t clone themselves to be at multiple talks at once, many slides are linked in the session descriptions below. Twin Cities local Kitty Hurley also put together this fantastic document summarizing much of what she saw at the meeting, so if slide decks aren’t linked, check out her notes.

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Practical Cartography Day Late Morning Session

Manual Shaded Relief of the World and the Patterson projection
20 Minutes
Tom Patterson, US National Park Service
Bernhard Jenny, Oregon State University
Bojan Savric, Oregon State University

I have two new products that will interest practical cartographers. The Manual Shaded Relief of the World is background art for making small-scale maps of the world and continents. I drew the relief in Photoshop with a Wacom tablet. It features generalized terrain without the busy textures typically found on small-scale digital relief. The manual relief registers with Natural Earth 1:50 million-scale vector data. It is available as a grayscale GeoTIFF (10,800 x 5,400 pixels) in the Geographic projection.

The Patterson projection is a cylindrical projection derived from the Miller 1. From the equator to latitude 55 degrees, the Patterson is nearly identical to the Miller. However, high latitudes on the Patterson are less exaggerated than on the Miller. The result is a relatively compact world map with familiar continental shapes.

I used both of these products to make a world political map that is in the public domain.

Designer as Cartographer
20 Minutes
Amy Lee Walton, Mapbox

This talk will be an overview / comparison of the basic tenants of graphic design with those of cartography. Including example applications of these principles, for work and play, as completed web maps with accompanying printed versions. This talk focuses more on principles and practices of great map design over technology, but will also touch on these concepts extended from web to print using open source tools such as Mapbox Studio and vector tiles.

Collecting Data from the Crowd - A Leaflet and CartoDB-based Stack
20 Minutes
Mike Foster, MIT Urban Studies and Planning

Collecting data from the crowd? This session details the creation of a crowdsourced data collection application through the use of a handful of popular tools including: LeafletJS, HTML/PHP, and the CartoDB SQL API. In a fast-paced, approachable manner, we will discuss the creation of this application and the development of a set of complementary workshops designed to introduce non-coders and cartographers to web mapping techniques. The tools in the stack for this exercise are entirely free and open source, all you need to provide is the webhosting.
http://mjfoster83.github.io/nacis-2015

Dropchop
10 Minutes
Sam Matthews, Code for America

The Dropchop project (github.com/cugos/dropchop) is an in-browser GIS editor. Using Turf.js and Mapbox.js users are able to upload their data to the website and execute spatial operations without downloading or installing a thing. I'd like to demo the tool!
bit.ly/nacisdropchop

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