A topic of much discussion at the recent NACIS Annual Meeting was diversity and inclusion. I think most NACIS members would agree that improving diversity in our profession is a worthy goal, even though amongst us we might have a range of different ideas about the practical steps needed to achieve that goal. Both the academic literature, as well as online news articles and blog posts, discuss how an increased focus on inclusivity has benefits for the profession, our organization, and the world we map. Some scholars have developed cartographic techniques to bring indigenous voices into maps (Pearce 2008), while others have developed or advocated for participatory mapping approaches that enable indigenous people to shape what is mapped and how it is mapped (de Almeida 2014; Wilmott 2019). In the popular press in 2018, Sarah Holder has examined how, when more women are involved in mapping, what is noticed and deemed worth mapping changes.
In some ways our organization has already made, and is continuing to make, progress on becoming more diverse and inclusive. I have now been a NACIS member and regular attendee of the conference for twenty years, and I am never the only female in the room anymore. This is also definitely not true at other conferences I regularly attend. Despite our progress, as a Society we can continue to improve and be more inclusive in other ways. Since the Annual Meeting, while wearing my editor hat, I have been thinking about how the journal can assist in improving diversity and supporting inclusion in our Society and the profession more broadly.
One way we can raise the profile of these issues is to solicit and review books about or authored by underrepresented groups. In this issue of CP, I can point you to the review of W.E.B. DuBois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. In his review, Brandyn Friedly wonders why John Snow’s cholera pump is ubiquitous while W.E.B. DuBois’s work is almost completely unknown among cartographers. Book reviews like these offer an opportunity raise the profile of underrepresented groups within the broader community. To that end, if you know of publications that NACIS members should know about, please get in touch with either myself or Mark Denil, our book reviews editor, to suggest that we solicit a review copy of the book.
A second way that the journal can contribute to diversity and inclusion is to solicit and publish opinion pieces that discuss diversity issues in the profession. We do have an opinion section, but we do not often receive contributions for consideration. If you would like to initiate a broader conversation about some aspect of diversity and inclusion, I encourage you to consider submitting a piece.
A third way is to support the development and publication of research on cartographic methods to bring additional voices into our maps. I encourage all of you to have a close look at Meghan Kelly’s peer-reviewed article in this issue, which brings feminist perspectives to symbols designed to tell the stories behind refugee border crossings.
I am sure there are more things we can also do within the journal to support diversity and inclusion. I encourage you to write to me at editor@nacis.org, to share your good ideas with me about how the journal can do something differently and/or additionally in support of these goals.
Because the first 2019 issue was special issue whose editorial was written by the guest editors, this issue is my first opportunity to thank those individuals who served as peer reviewers for submissions to CP with final decisions in 2018. Without these reviewers, we would not have a quality journal.
I would also like to acknowledge the support I receive from CP’s Assistant Editor, Daniel P. Huffman, my section editors (Jake Coolidge, Terri Robar, Sarah Bell, Fritz Kessler, and Mark Denil), and CP’s Editorial Board (Sarah Battersby, Cynthia Brewer, Matt Dooley, Matthew Edney, Sara Fabrikant, Bernhard Jenny, Patrick Kennelly, Mark Monmonier, Ian Muehlenhaus, Michael Peterson, Anthony Robinson, Amy Rock, and Robert Roth). CP relies heavily on the contributions that all of these volunteers make to producing our Society’s journal.
CP 93 kicks off with an edited version of the address given by the most recent winners of the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography, James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, entitled “Imagination and Collaboration.” Winners of the award are invited to address the Society at the Annual Meeting. NACIS will be seeking nominations for the next conferral of this award in early 2020. I hope that this piece inspires you to think about someone whose work you could nominate. Watch out for details on how to nominate someone for this award in NACIS News.
In CP 93, you will find two peer-reviewed articles. In the first, Peter Cobb and colleagues describe a research-led pedagogical approach to teaching about spatial analysis of the past, through asking students to produce web maps of a landscape in western Anatolia from historical literary accounts describing that place. In their article they reflect on the tools they used, insights about the place being mapped that were derived from the mapping process, and the ability of the approach to support students in learning to think critically about digital tools.
In the second article, Meghan Kelly also visits the Near East in her account of developing a new approach to mapping border crossings based on her interviews with Syrian refugees. She demonstrates how feminist perspectives and concepts such as the body, intersectionality, reflexivity, and transformation can be used to enrich conventional cartographic representations of borders to capture border experiences more richly. To illustrate her techniques, she applies them to maps of the border crossings described in her interviews. She presents methods suited for mapping single crossings experienced by a single interviewee as well as methods for aggregating and comparing border experiences.
In cartographic collections, Theresa Quill and Michelle Dalmau describe Indiana University Libraries’ program of digitizing their Russian Military Topographic Map collection to make it more widely available. An interesting component of their collection management method is that it documents not only the standard map metadata but also the provenance of each map, providing insight into how the map made it out of the Soviet sphere of influence and into American hands.
In visual fields, Jake Coolidge profiles the finalists of MonoCarto 2019, a monochrome mapping competition organized by CP’s Assistant Editor, Daniel P. Huffman. If you weren’t able to see these works in print at the Annual Meeting, you can see them, along with commentary from the judges, in this volume’s visual fields.
Six book reviews complete CP 93. Jasmin Khangura reviews Mapping Asia: Cartographic Encounters Between West and East, a title that presents a collection of papers based on a meeting of the International Cartographic Association’s Commission on the History of Cartography. Brandyn Friedly introduces us to W.E.B. DuBois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, a fascinating discussion of an exhibition W.E.B DuBois developed for the Exposition Universalle in Paris in 1900 to tell the story of African Americans since Emancipation. Brandyn wonders why this work is not better known within our community. His review inspired me to buy the book; perhaps it will do so for you too. Next, Betsy Mason and Greg Miller’s recent book, All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey is reviewed by daan Strebe. He notes that the volume contains many examples of less-known maps with interesting stories behind them, and endorses it as an interesting and pleasurable read. Harrison Cole reviews Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics, the most recent book authored by the 2018 Corlis Benefideo Award winners James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti. While their address, which opens this issue, provides some details about the construction of individual maps, Harrison’s review provides you with an overview of the volume’s contents. John T. Bauer assesses the contribution of a recent addition to books on using GIS in teaching, Introduction to Human Geography Using ArcGIS Online. He finds that it could be used to support a GIS-led approach to teaching a general introductory human geography course using easy-to-use GIS tools. Finally, Nat Case reviews The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, a book of 25 essays devoted to examining the intersection between maps and literature.
I hope you enjoy the contents of this issue.
Amy L. Griffin
Editor, Cartographic Perspectives
de Almeida, Regina Araujo. 2014. “Inclusive Cartography: Theoretical and Applied Issues in Brazil.” In Developments in the Theory and Practice of Cybercartography Applications and Indigenous Mapping, edited by D. R. Fraser Taylor and Tracey P. Lauriault, 107–127. Amsterdam: Elsevier. http://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-62713-1.00008-8.
Pearce, Margaret Wickens. 2008. “Framing the Days: Place and Narrative in Cartography.” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 35 (1): 17–32. http://doi.org/10.1559/152304008783475661.
Wilmott, Clancy. 2019. “‘Mapping-with’: The Politics of (Counter-)classification in OpenStreetMap.” Cartographic Perspectives 92: 43–57. http://doi.org/10.14714/CP92.1451.