The 37th NACIS Annual Meeting was recently held in Montréal, Québec, Canada, a long-overdue visit to the northernmost country in our region. As a time when many of our organization’s members are able to meet in person, establishing friendships and collaborations both personal and professional, it is a highlight of the cartographic year for the NACIS organization. I know that for quite a few attendees, these personal interactions at the meeting have changed the way they think about their work or inspired new projects. The opinion piece in this volume speaks about one such experience from one of our members, Tom Koch, and his participation in a panel discussion on morals, ethics, and cartography at the 2005 Annual Meeting. I hope that reading his piece might prompt you to reflect on your own experiences at past meetings, and how you have found them to be of value. For those of you who have not yet been able to come to a meeting, I hope it might inspire you give it a try at the 2018 meeting in Norfolk, Virginia. If cost is a barrier, I encourage you to consider applying for a NACIS Professional or Student Member travel grant.
While re-reading the opinion piece in advance of writing this letter, I began to notice other connections to discussions at past NACIS Annual Meetings on the topic of ethics and cartography. First and foremost was Steven Holloway’s concept of “Right Map Making,” which encapsulates some of his ideas about ethical map-making, and which was published as a letterpress broadside and distributed to attendees at the 2007 Annual Meeting. For those of you who were not there in St. Louis, you can see a copy of this text at Steven’s website (www.tomake.com/rightmapmaking.html). Revisiting Steven’s text then led me to think about the organization’s Corlis Benefideo Award (nacis.org/awards/corlis-benefideo-award), which honors mapmakers who “make maps for a future to be possible,” to quote Steven Holloway. The perturbations of one presentation or session sometimes travel much wider and deeper than one might guess.
One of my goals as Editor is to help to bring some of the meeting’s richness into the journal for those of our readers who were unable to be in attendance for one reason or another. One way in which we are working to do that is through enriching the video recordings of presentations given at the meeting with a contextual piece and additional resources provided by the presenter. Our first experiment with this was a piece by Emily Eros, based on a presentation from the 2016 Annual Meeting, published in Volume 84 last year. In this volume, Jamie Robertson speaks about enhancing his productivity when working with Adobe Illustrator to update hundreds of bicycling maps at the Adventure Cycling Association. While listening to Jamie’s talk in Montréal, the NACIS member next to whom I was sitting commented that what he learned in that one presentation would more than save him more than the cost of attending the meeting in increased productivity. So we hope to pass Jamie’s knowledge and experience on to a wider audience through the journal.
In CP 87, you will also find a peer-reviewed article by Alison Feeney, whose piece identifies an industry that is crying out for the skills that cartographers can bring—experiential tourism—in her piece entitled “Beer-trail Maps and the Growth of Experiential Tourism.”
In cartographic collections, Igor Drecki from the University of Auckland Library tells the story of how a digitization project in New Zealand has led to a number of new scientific discoveries through studies that were made possible by the improved accessibility to New Zealand’s cartographic heritage that the IMAGINZ project has provided.
I take great delight in presenting Preethi Balakrishnan and Kelsey Boylan’s imaginative atlas, a fictional anthology of 13 maps about food and culinary pursuits, which is reproduced in full this volume’s visual fields contribution. We are grateful that they generously allowed us to publish the entire piece rather than a few isolated selections.
The works of three book reviewers complete CP 87. The first is Mark Denil’s review of Mapping and Modeling Weather and Climate with GIS. The second is Russel Kirby’s review of American Capitals, in which he concludes that maybe the topic doesn’t warrant a monograph-length treatment. Gregory March assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a recent addition to the Making Spatial Decisions series from Esri Press, Making Spatial Decisions Using GIS and Lidar. Finally, Mark Denil is on double-duty in CP 87, also reviewing the Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps.
I encourage you to spend some time over the holidays perusing this latest volume of CP and wish you all happy mapmaking in 2018.
Amy L. Griffin
Cartographic Perspectives Editor