Last year I joined Patrick Kennelly as the co-Editor of Cartographic Perspectives to “learn the ropes,” as one might say. I have had the pleasure of watching and learning from Pat as he shepherded articles through the peer-review process, and coordinated the work of the Section Editors who source and edit content for the other sections of the journal. I’d like to thank him for breaking me in gently, and being available as a colleague with whom I could confer when trying to make decisions and communicate them to authors. I now feel ready to take the training wheels off and move the journal down the road.
In so doing, I am fortunate to have the continued support of many individuals including:
I would like to thank Andy Woodruff, who has served as the Section Editor for On the Horizon for several years and is stepping down from that role. When this section was established, it was relatively rare for mapmakers to code, and a section that focused on that topic seemed both useful and novel. Now, if the NACIS Annual Meeting is any guide to what is happening in everyday mapmaking, most cartographers are coding in some way or another, whether they are automating steps in Photoshop through a macro, or scripting dynamic map behaviors for interactive maps using JavaScript. Thus, after some discussion and thought among members of the Editorial Team, we have decided to retire On the Horizon; the content we once published in this section now fits best in the Practical Cartographer's Corner, as it’s what practical cartographers are frequently doing.
In 2010, CP became cartography’s first (and still only!) fully open-access journal, and NACIS members no longer received a print edition of the journal by default. In 2011, CP moved to the Open Journal System platform, which has allowed us to distribute the journal digitally, and offer authors online publication of their work more quickly after acceptance. Since 2011, we have still had a number of print subscribers, mostly libraries, for whom we provided a printed volume at a higher cost than the normal NACIS dues.
Some libraries have dropped their print subscriptions in favor of pointing their patrons to our digital edition. This was an expected outcome of the decision to take CP open-access. It now no longer makes economic sense to print the journal for the small number of remaining print subscribers. Therefore, the NACIS Board recently decided to cease publication of the print edition beginning with CP 83 and offer the journal only in digital format.
This decision allows the society to invest in innovative projects, such as recording and streaming presentations at the NACIS annual meeting, which we trialled in 2016. As a result, we are also able to innovate in CP. CP 84 will feature a contribution that builds on one of these recorded presentations to both bring that content to audiences who were not able to attend in person, and to expand upon the content presented in Colorado Springs. I hope you look forward to engaging with this new format.
In CP 83, you will find a peer-reviewed article by Paolo Raposo, Cynthia Brewer, and Kevin Sparks, describing a method for designing impressionistic land cover base map layers in larger-scale topographic maps, providing a more legible base map than the orthoimages that are in common use at these scales. Their method can also be used in conjunction with orthoimages and terrain shading to draw upon the strengths of all three layers.
The Evans Map Room at Dartmouth College is the cartographic collection featured in CP 83. Read about Lucinda Hall’s fantastic efforts to make the Map Room’s heavily used New Hampshire Sanborn maps accessible to the world by digitizing them and distributing them via the Internet: the starting point for the Map Room’s growing digital collection series, focused on maps of New Hampshire.
In Visual Fields, Matthew Picton presents a series of compelling, three-dimensional sculptures of cities from around the world, capturing aspects of their history, culture, and sense of place, using maps and images to transport you to these locations.
Three book reviews complete CP 83. The first is Mark Denil’s review of Globes: 400 Years of Exploration, Navigation, and Power. The second is Lisa Sutton’s review of the Historical Atlas of Maine, which features the maps of NACIS member Mike Hermann, and which received the American Association of Geographers’ Globe Award for Public Understanding of Geography. Mark Denil is on double-duty in CP 83, also reviewing the Oxford Atlas of the World, Twenty-First Edition.
I hope that you will dive into the journal to get your cartographic fix of the day, and pass along what you learned to your carto-colleagues and friends.
Amy L. Griffin
Editor