Taking terrain to new heights with ArcGIS
20 Minutes
Kenneth Field, Esri Inc
Patrick Kennelly, LIU post, Long Island University
Ever wanted to go beyond default contour or hillshade representations of terrain and make something really stylish in ArcGIS? Yep, me too. Now you can with our new suite of stunning terrain tools for ArcGIS for Desktop. This session will take a single DEM and explore alternative ways to showcase your terrain including beautiful new hillshades that mimic hand-drawn techniques as well as filled contours and illuminated contours. We’ll also showcase artistic techniques such as hachures, shadow lines and sky models as well as historic looking styles, 3D chromastereoscopic mapping and 3D Choropleths. These techniques bring artistry to your maps using easy to use tools that we’ll demonstrate and which support your print and also 2D and 3D web mapping.
http://t.co/JRbwuxVT69
Redesigning Atlas Maps for Social Media
10 Minutes
Alethea Steingisser, InfoGraphics Lab, University of Oregon
James Meacham, InfoGraphics Lab, University of Oregon
In partnership with the Wyoming Migration Initiative, the UO InfoGraphics Lab is repurposing cartographic products created for the print atlas, the Atlas of Wildlife Migration: Wyoming’s Ungulates for social media outreach. The social media maps deliver timely stories about migrations and biological research that reflect live field work and satellite data collection while also building a strong social media following. This short talk will explore the design choices we considered regarding long versus short-term publication life, map purpose, and publication method used when redesigning these maps for social media.
MaPublisher at National Geographic
15 Minutes
Matthew Chwastyk, National Geographic Society
This powerful plugin for Adobe Illustrator is transforming the cartographic process. Its suite of tools aids in every aspect of the journey a map takes from concept to final proof. I'll detail how the software has been implemented for research, production, and in the editorial stages.
A quick guide to U.S. Department of Transportation datasets
15 Minutes
Justyna Goworowska, U.S. Department of TransportationThe U.S. Department of
Transportation provides data, much of which is spatial, on transportation infrastructure, passenger and freight movements, safety, and enforcement. The National Transportation Atlas Database (NTAD) is an annually updated spatial dataset of point, line, and polygon features. It includes multiple transportation-related features, from airports and bridges to highways and railways, as well as attribute information. This presentation will introduce users to the various datasets available through the US DOT and how to access them.
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
Repurposing Print Cartography (and more) for a Multi-Resolution World
15 Minutes
Seth Fitzsimmons, Stamen
Alan McConchie, Stamen
Paper and LED touch screens are both amazing pieces of technology, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. National Geographic has been producing gorgeous print work for decades. Stamen has been producing web-native work for years. We recently adapted NG's print production pipeline to produce multi-resolution content for an upcoming project. I'll talk about how.
https://speakerdeck.com/mojodna/print-cartography-in-a-multi-resolution-world
Mapping the Future Patagonia National Park
15 Minutes
Ross Donihue, Maps for Good
Marty Schnure, Maps for Good
At Maps for Good, we think about a map not just as a tool for navigation, but as a canvas for telling a story. Come hear about our most recent project to make an interactive map of the Farallon Islands. While this refuge is managed by a public agency, it remains strictly off limits to the public due to their sensitivity, importance, and uniqueness of the ecosystem. We can't bring the public to the islands, but we want to bring the islands to the public with a rich interactive map. The talk will discuss our first expedition to the islands, our workflow, field data collection, and techniques for applying principles of print cartography to interactive maps.
http://bit.ly/1M1WAaI
An Overview of ArcMap-to-Illustrator Workflows of the National Hydropower Asset Assessment Program
20 Minutes
Nicole Samu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Brenna L. Elrod, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
This paper provides a high-level summary of ArcMap-to-Adobe Illustrator (ArcMap-to-Illustrator) workflows adopted by the National Hydropower Asset Assessment Program (NHAAP) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for generating multiple national and regional maps to support US hydropower research on asset management, resource assessment, and environmental barrier analysis. Several general methods that have been useful for the creation of national and regional hydropower maps will be introduced and compared. Collectively, the goal of this paper is to provide ArcMap-to-Illustrator map production methods that others may benefit from and to spur follow-on discussion and action on ways to improve these methods and overcome some common cartographic production challenges.
FixWikiMaps Project
10 Minutes
Brian Davidson, DigitalGlobe
Alan McConchie, Stamen Design
Joshua Stevens, NASA Earth Observatory
On Wikipedia, anyone is allowed to submit changes, updates, and graphics to any page on the site. Along with these graphics, there are a large number of maps and visualizations that are posted. Unfortunately, many of the maps are rarely updated again. To combat this problem, Brian Davidson, Alan McConchie, and Joshua Stevens created the FixWikiMaps Project, with the ultimate goal to correct, update, and beautify the maps on Wikipedia. To begin finding and fixing these maps, The FixWikiMaps Project has teamed up with NACIS to create MapLift, a week long map-a-thon to upgrade existing Wikipedia maps and make new ones.
Restyling Old & Cluttered Maps
20 Minutes
Vanessa Knoppke-Wetzel, MacFadden
Many of my humanitarian organization’s map specs have not been restyled in more than ten years and have obvious needs of aesthetic overhaul, and thus can quickly and easily be changed from old to new. Nevertheless, some map style specs have continuously been problematic in their respective visual representations and design because of the amount of information required to be on a single map, combined with the sparse amount of extra time humanitarian aid cartographers can take to experiment and find better means of visual representation. However, I got lucky because as soon as I was employed I was tasked with the aesthetic overhaul of my department's map styles. This presentation goes through my restyling process, with explanations of what changes are needed for each respective map type, the various iterations, and ultimately, the final map styles and why they were (or were not) chosen.
https://speakerdeck.com/vknoppkewetzel/nacis-pcd-talk-2015-restyling-old-and-cluttered-maps
Terrain Data Sources Online
20 Minutes
Paulo Raposo, Dept of Geography, Penn State
Terrain data for almost of all of the Earth is freely available online in different formats and resolutions. This presentation will review some sources and portals to these data, many of which are related to NASA, the USGS, and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan (METI). Also, the talk will briefly describe how to generate DEMs from publicly-available LiDAR LAS files using the open source GIS SAGA.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/pzr111/publications/Raposo_NACIS_PCD_presentation.pdf
A Matter of Perspective
20 Minutes
Daniel P. Huffman, somethingaboutmaps
A walkthrough which covers some of the challenges & solutions in creating a map of Lake Michigan from an unusual perspective: one in which the circumference of the lake has been distorted into a straight line.
bit.ly/matterofperspective
CartoCSS Essentials
15 Minutes
Katie Kowalsky, UW Cartography Lab
Robert Roth, UW Madison
While designing lab work for an advanced graphic design in cartography course, I've been exploring the often impractical, but fun applications of CartoCSS using Mapbox Studio. Through the context of aesthetic mapping, we can learn the essentials of styling a basemap. I'll walk through various tips and tricks to take your vector tileset to the next level.
http://slides.com/kkowalsky/nacis-2015#/
Vector Cartography in ArcGIS
25 Minutes
Craig Williams, Esri
ArcGIS has a variety of options for vector cartography. I'll give an overview of recent enhancements to ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro. Finally, I'll explain and show vector tiles in the ArcGIS platform and how they can be leveraged for your mapping applications in the desktop, web, and mobile.
