It was wonderful to see many of you in Greenville at the Society’s 2013 Annual Meeting! Our October gatherings allow us to talk maps among kindred spirits, reconnect with old friends, be inspired, and learn new practical techniques for everyday mapping. Thank you to David Lambert and Peter Wrenn for hosting us in South Carolina, and to all of our presenters.
This year’s Annual Meeting continued to blend web-focused “neo” cartography with desktop and print mapping including during Practical Cartography Day and our Saturday workshops. As interest in mapping has surged, so too has attendance at our Annual Meeting. We continued the 3rd session track this year to showcase more of your great work. NACIS isn’t just about looking at maps, it’s about sharing, leaning in, and building great maps.
Content, craft, design, and interaction all come together in cartography. This visual storytelling approach, as our keynote speaker Alberto Cairo so eloquently (and humorously!) presented, allows us to tease out a story's geographic characteristics and show them in context with map, text, and image.
The society was pleased to bestow the first Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography upon Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison for their contributions to the field of mapping. Cartography is often seen by the public as work opposed to imagination, grounded entirely in established fact. While this devotion to reflecting what is forms the heart of cartographic thinking, cartographers and artists who use maps as a basis for their work can (and do) take that grounding in fact and use it to venture into the world of the possible. The Harrisons certainly embody this principle.
As the Society’s volunteer Board of Directors has changed, we’ve focused on documenting policies and procedures to help the Society run smoother. Many thanks to Tanya, Lou, and Susan for leading the “continuity” effort and especially to past Presidents Erik Steiner and Neil Allen for ensuring the Society has the stability and leadership to continue our great mission to further cartographic information.
As part of modernizing the Society, I’m pleased to report we are on track for relaunching nacis.org this year with a new look, updated content, and easier content management and back office systems.
This is a big year for NACIS! CartoTalk launched 10 years ago and our flagship publication, the only open-access journal for cartography, Cartographic Perspectives, turns 25. Please join me in Pittsburgh to celebrate these accomplishments and to talk maps. The 2014 Call for Participation can be found in the back of this issue, and is also posted at nacis.org. What have you been mapping?
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso
President