Patrick Kennelly, CW Post Campus of Long Island University | patrick.kennelly@liu.edu
After much anticipation, we at Cartographic Perspectives (CP) are proud to welcome you to our new website. There are many changes that come with this move that I would like to be sure you are aware of as we lay a course through the whorls of the world of a fully integrated online publication system.
If you are a reader of CP, it is a great time to be a member of NACIS. All members are subscribed automatically to CP, which includes online access to all content, and is one of many exciting NACIS member benefits. At our new journal site, we have posted all of the current articles and the most recent issues in various formats so that our content can be easily accessed from nearly any device with Internet access.
Perhaps you’ve heard, however, that CP is going “open access.” Doesn’t that mean anyone can access CP content? The answer is no. Non-NACIS members, in addition to enduring numerous other indescribable hardships, are not able to access many sections of CP, including Cartographic Collections, Reviews, Visual Fields, and Marginalia. In fact, only articles in the Peer-Reviewed and On the Horizon sections are openly available at present time.
The complexity of designing such an open journal system (or OJS, as it is often abbreviated) is a big reason that we are no longer on the NACIS website. Our new home at cartographicperspectives.org (or cartoperspectives.org) is tailored in a way that we hope can meet and adapt to the changing needs of our readers, contributors, journal, and organization.
We hope readers find themselves visiting the CP website frequently. Issues will continue to be serialized, which, for the editorial team, is always a time of unbridled joy. With our new website, however, individual articles that will eventually be included in upcoming issues (beginning with CP 70) will be published separately. This new publication flow is designed to better meet the needs of our readers and authors by offering more immediate content while still collecting articles into electronic or printed issues for distribution to individuals or institutions.
If you are an author considering publishing with CP, changes are afoot. In this— our first—transition stage, our OJS allows authors of peer-reviewed manuscripts to upload content for review. This process will help to minimize and standardize the huge amount of decentralized file sharing heretofore required of authors, reviewers, and myself. If you are interested in contributing to any of our other sections, for now continue to contact and submit to the section editor.
Authors submitting to our OJS are obvious recipients of many of the benefits of this construct. As soon as they submit, I can send along their manuscript to reviewers immediately, without concern for how much storage remains in my paltry university email account. Once accepted in its final form and copy edited, articles are not relegated to publication purgatory, waiting on the sins of the editor or other authors to be absolved. The article is immediately posted and searchable, both in our OJS and on the web, and able to be cited by other authors, even potentially a writer contributing to the same issue.
But enough about logistics for now; our OJS only serves to make the content you have come here to read more accessible. CP 69 contains two peer-reviewed articles on very different subjects, but sharing design concerns near to the heart of many cartographers. Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny discuss their cross-blended hypsometric tints for representing terrain, color schemes that enhance historical color tints and are already popular and frequently utilized by mapmakers worldwide. Ian Muehlenhaus explains methods associated with quantitative content analysis, applying such methodologies to selected thematic maps from Goode’s World Atlas over the last 80 years. Both articles are grounded in the work of the past, but focused on current design considerations.
In the Cartographic Collections section, Carolyn Hansen of the Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) in New York describes outreach initiatives of this institution. She explains creative, online efforts to “unhide” the marvels of the map collection there. The article is beautifully illustrated with photographs of the BHS’s stately chamber and examples of its elegant maps.
In the Practical Cartographer’s Corner, Kevin McManigal offers tips on using Graphic Styles and Appearance palettes in Adobe Illustrator CS 5 for mapmaking. As Section Editor Alex Tait points out, these techniques can make time-consuming tasks less laborious, freeing the cartographer’s time to focus on design.
On the Horizon this issue features another contribution by the prolific Ian Muehlenhaus. Ian explains how to take maps created in Adobe Illustrator and publish them to the Android platform. In this manner, any map that a user has created in Illustrator can be converted to an “app” and sold through the Android Market. Any reader interested in maps on mobile devices should find this article of much interest.
The Reviews section includes four book reviews sure to be of interest to CP readers. Regarding this section, Mark Denil has decided to step down as Reviews Section Editor. Mark has worked tirelessly with reviewers for the past 16 issues, ensuring the highest quality of reviews for CP readership. Reviewers have made a point of praising his editorial work, and past, present, and future book reviews stand as testament to his dedication and professionalism as a section editor. Looking forward, I am happy to announce that Lisa Sutton of the American Geographical Society Library has agreed to be the new Section Editor for Reviews. I welcome Lisa and invite you to contact her about potential or pending reviews.
The Visual Fields piece for this issue features the transit network diagrams of Cameron Booth. These eye-catching graphics display networks of roads and rails, and help the user, as Cameron states, “make visual sense of a vast and chaotic transportation network(s).” In the rotation for Marginalia in this issue is an interview with cartographer Patrick Hofmann, renowned designer of icons for Google Maps. Many lucky enough to see Patrick’s opening keynote address at NACIS 2011 were left wishing for more detail on his insight into icon design. Now, thanks to the efforts of former NACIS Student Board Representative Tim Wallace, we all have an opportunity to sit down with Patrick in a more intimate fashion and hear additional details on him and his icons.
With so many outstanding articles, it seems difficult to contain it all in one website, no matter how shiny new and well-built it is. So go ahead and share the open access articles in any way you see fit, as links, downloads, or prints. As for articles in other sections, enjoy the benefits of NACIS membership. Thanks for visiting us at cartographicperspectives.org, and we hope to see you here often.
- Patrick Kennelly