Abstracts
Visions of Old Lagos: Mapping Landscape & Culture from the 1851 Bombardments
Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi
This presentation explores representations of Lagos (Nigeria) — the city and islands — in the mid-nineteenth century, and creates new visualizations of the old city based on its archival and ethnographic record. Between 1845 and 1851, kingship struggles in old Lagos meant power rotated between two kin: Kosoko and Akitoye. In late 1851, British naval officers intervened on behalf of the latter, ostensibly to stop the slave trade out of the Lagos port. The maps they sketched to plan the bombardments are some of the earliest representations of the city and island’s original landscape and population. While the officers reimagined the space and geography with their own names to map their conquest, their maps also stored important details corroborated by local myth and oríkì.
This presentation will address themes including cartographic violence and erasure, as well as conceptions of indigenous West African urban landscapes and culture. A century of new infrastructure and expansions by sand-filling means that contemporary Lagos retains only echoes of the nineteenth century. The new maps of old Lagos drawn from examining the bombardment maps with the oral archive of myths, reveal new insights about a landscape wounded by slavery, religion, and political violence.
Felt: Pioneering a New Era in Online Cartography
Mamata Akella
In the age of digital innovation, cartography has evolved dramatically from traditional paper maps to interactive online platforms. This talk focuses on the fusion of cartography and the digital realm, highlighting Felt—an emerging technology—as a key player in revolutionizing online mapmaking.
Felt seamlessly blends user-friendly design with advanced GIS and design capabilities, ushering in a new era of mapmaking that is intuitive, accessible, and collaborative. This presentation dives into the key features of Felt that empower individuals to create dynamic maps and data visualizations, transcending the boundaries of traditional cartography. Join me as we explore how Felt is reshaping the landscape of online map creation, bridging the gap between technology and creativity to bring maps to life in innovative and engaging ways.
Don’t Be a Square: Circular Delights from the Analog Age of Information Graphics
RJ Andrews
People are attracted to circles, they are bulls-eyes for attention. Yet we live in a rectangular world: Our buildings are square, our pixels are square, and our charts are square. Today, it’s so easy to be square, it’s hard to be anything else.
There was a time when statistical graphics embraced more imaginative shapes, and circular designs stood out as creative and captivating. Back then, the marginal cost of experimenting with new ideas was small: The designer’s pencil could furnish something weird, nearly as easy as reproducing a rote bar chart. They had builder’s squares, but they had drafting compasses too.
We will tour a chronological history of circular statistical graphics, including pie charts, roses, sunbursts, and other more exotic forms. (For time, we will avoid circular relationship diagrams and simple circle-size comparisons.) Along the way, we will see charts from legendary designers, including: William Playfair, André-Michel Guerry, Léon Lalanne, Charles-Joseph Minard, William Farr, Florence Nightingale, Émile Cheysson, W. E. B. DuBois, and more.
Our tour will highlight unconventional design flourishes and reveal behind-the-scenes craft insights, including the evolution of circular diagrams as traced through designer relationships. Many of these spotlights are possible because of research supporting my latest book, Florence Nightingale, Mortality and Health Diagrams (Visionary Press, 2022).
The Great War sucked so much life out of the world. With it went beautiful print culture, and most beautiful charts, replaced by corporate brutalism. However, remnants of circular delights persisted, surviving far beyond the borders of Western empires. With time, we will take a peek at some of these constructions too. By the conclusion of our journey, I hope you will want to reclaim and revive circular diagrams too.
“Fostering a Feeling of World Community”: Isotype and Map Design
Benjamin Benus
Between the 1920s and the 1950s, numerous designers of popular reference works embraced an approach to information design known as Isotype. Developed with general audiences in mind, this graphic method used countable pictograms to represent quantitative data and figured prominently in geographical atlases of the interwar and postwar years. The creators of these atlases were active within a variety of political contexts, and their Isotype-inspired maps consequently advanced a wide range of ideological views. However, the method had special significance for designers seeking to cultivate democratic values, a global identity, and an internationalist perspective.
This talk will examine two landmark Isotype publications that exemplify this democratic and internationalist vision: the 1930 Society and Economy atlas (the work of a Vienna-based design team led by Otto Neurath, the method’s earliest theorist and advocate) and the 1953 World Geo-Graphic Atlas (whose designer, the Austrian-born artist Herbert Bayer, drew heavily on the example of Neurath’s work). Though produced in different contexts, both publications’ designs were guided by the conviction that a democratically engaged and internationally oriented readership would need to acquire critical map reading skills and information literacy at a relatively sophisticated level. This talk explores how the creators of these publications used Isotype in their efforts to impart these skills and why they believed that the method’s design principles were uniquely suited to achieving these educational objectives.
Patchwork Stories: Embodied Queer Geographies and Storytelling Through Data Visualization
Gabriella Evergreen
Queer geographies consider the role of place and space in shaping identities and forming communities. Participatory queer maps offer critical ways of making visible the stories and experiences that have historically been difficult to map. Recent projects in the area of queer geography seek to map queer and trans joy amidst a climate of increasing hostility and violence toward the LGBTQ community. Embodied data visualization can offer exciting new ways of mapping these stories, inspiring vulnerability and sharing, and making the intangible tangible through the use of textiles and fiber arts.
Californian snowflakes
Ken Field
During winter 2022-2023 California experienced record snowfall, with some areas receiving over 20m (65ft). This short flurry of a talk explores a new map that illustrates this snowfall thematically using 50 sq km hex-bins that each show the average total accumulation. While hex-binning is a reasonably common thematic mapping technique, here the hexagonal shapes are symbolised using digital recreations of Wilson ‘snowflake’ Bentley’s microphotographs of real snowflakes from the late 1800s. Higher total accumulation is shown using fuller, opaque snowflakes while lower accumulation is shown with smaller, whispy snowflakes. The snowflakes are modified by size and transparency that gives an impression of the relative amount of snowfall across the state. The snowflakes on the map are printed using Pantone Spot metallic silver to give them a hint of a sparkle that is suggestive of the way in which snow glistens on a crisp winter’s morning. A spot UV layer is used as a further visual variable that represents the areas that gained more than 100in (250cm) total snow accumulation. These two print techniques are applied across a monochrome lithographic print that uses negative space for the map’s other detail (borders, graph, text, title block). The purpose here is to illustrate not only an artistic form of map symbology where snowflakes are randomly applied but which conform to classification of relative accumulation, but also how printing techniques can themselves be used in innovative ways to enhance, and complement data representation.
A Celebration of Les Chevaliers des Albums de Statistique Graphique
Michael Friendly
Historical work in #dataviz and cartography is most often pursued by individuals – Edward Tufte, Arthur H. Robinson, etc. However, sometimes, a collective arises to do the Great Work -- a group with common interests but making a whole larger than the sum of its parts, as with the History of Cartography project organized by Matthew Edney at University of Wisconsin-Madison. This talk is the story of another such group, Les Chavaliers des Albums de Statistique Graphique --- some here today in person, one here with us in spirit --- I organized over 25 years ago as a fellowship to assemble a comprehensive catalogue of the important events, images and references in the history of data visualization, including thematic cartography.
The story began with a single, mind-blowing image from the 1864 volume of the Albums de Statistique Graphique published in France from 1879-1899 shown to me by my late dear friend Antoine de Falguerolles. It progressed to what I’ve called the Milestones Project and long collaborations among the group we call Les Chevaliers. I illustrate my story with a collection of images and a few historical discoveries.
Maps for movement: The unique nature of automotive navigation maps
Mel Imfeld
Moving people, packages, and vehicles from A to B poses unique challenges for digital map-making.
This talk addresses the unique nature and challenges of in-car navigation maps by drawing from the experience of cartographers and engineers at Mapbox when building navigation maps in collaboration with automotive partners. Map-making for in-car navigation is driven by factors like safety, data accuracy and freshness, unique form factors and efficiency. We will discuss how designing for these factors informs the architecture and design of effective navigation maps. At the same time, the automotive design industry is just as dynamic as navigation maps themselves, and this talk will offer a perspective on how Mapbox is driving innovation for automotive navigation.
The Land, the Water, the Sky: Volumetric Sovereignty and Indigenous Visual Culture
Elspeth Iralu
What can Indigenous landscape representations tell us about the relationship between the aerial perspective and colonial dispossession?
Contemporary colonial control of Indigenous lands in the United States requires a severing of aerial, surficial, and subterranean spaces. Rights to subterranean minerals, oil, gas, and water function differently from territorial rights on the surface of the earth, and, unlike nation-states, Indigenous nations are not recognized as having sovereignty over airspace. While the aerial perspective is used to monitor and collect data about Indigenous territories, the colonial state sees Indigenous sovereignty as permanently grounded.
This paper considers an Indigenous landscape representation that riffs on the birds-eye-view as an epistemological challenge to colonial divisions between air, surface and subsurface. I analyze Thunderbird Strike, an Indigenous video game designed by Elizabeth LaPensée that addresses extractivism in the North American Great Lakes region, articulating an intimate relationship between air, surface, and subterranean. Players act as a thunderbird who navigates by flying through a cross-sectional view of land, water, and sky to collect lighting and strike objects on and below land and water. Rather than see these as discrete sites which can be claimed and capitalized upon in distinction from each other, Thunderbird Strike exposes the intimate connection and co-constitution of these vertical spaces. This digital spatial representation disorients the viewer from normative ways of seeing and surveilling Indigenous territories and reorients the viewer to be emplaced within the landscape as a thunderbird whose bird’s-eye-view extends below the subsurface, beyond the parameters of a drone’s view. As a visual representation of Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, this video game makes clear the relationship between air, surface, and subterranean as intimately linked, inseparable, and indiscrete.
Drawing Water: the art of making watersheds visible
Stacy Levy
Our waterways are like capillaries across the land, carrying water from sky to sea. With the same branching pattern of our blood vessels, the watersheds carry the life blood of our planet.
But these watersheds are often too vast and too invisible for us to understand. We know the patterns of roads and highways surrounding our neighborhoods, but rarely do we know how the local waters connect. Art can create a new kind of legibility to picturing watersheds by changing the scale and materials of mapping. The artist Stacy Levy will show her permanent and temporary art installations that create new ways to make watersheds visible.
Enacting the Underground Railroad: Landscapes of Resistance and Ingenuity
Karen Lewis
In 1893, Wilbur Seibert, a history professor at The Ohio State University, published a book containing maps that depicted the first systematized vision of the routes enslaved people used to escape across the Ohio River and into the free North and Canada. Seibert spent decades of his career interviewing Black men and women who fled slavery through Ohio and recorded accounts of the "agents"––nearly 3,000 white land-owners––who sheltered fugitives in their homes. Though not the first recording of those who escaped slavery, Seibert's work is acknowledged as the first "academic" practice –– his research, questionnaires, letters, written notes, and interviews with Black liberation seekers are digitized and preserved by the state archives.
Though graphically compelling and seemingly well documented, Seibert's map leaves many stories untold. This map prioritizes the white abolitionists, homes, and institutions that stand today as the primary nodes and stations of the Underground Railroad. However, the Underground Railroad was not just a series of abolitionist nodes and virtuous establishments on a singular track, as the map might suggest, but instead was an act of defiance and resistance enacted by the ingenuity of Black men and women who created each route. Every line on Seibert's map represents thousands of stories of those who sought liberation from slavery. How do we expand the totalizing line to represent the extent and singularity of each path courageously created?
This presentation will share the research, mapping, and graphic tools employed by Karen Lewis, architect, educator and researcher, who maps and visualizes the narratives embedded within these maps. By expanding archival narratives, researching historical maps and records, and linking architectural, topographic, and urban conditions across current landscapes, the mapping project gives insight into both the performance of those who created their paths out of slavery, as well as cartographic tools that engage research, design and audience participation.
Embodied Cartography
Lize Mogel
Counter-cartography appropriates map design conventions in order to analyze and represent power dynamics, challenge territorial norms, support and represent social movements, and bring marginalized histories to the surface. It can be used by artists, designers, and cartographers to visualize the complexity of human experience within the form of the map. This presentation will explore my shift from using two-dimensional cartographic form to represent the human data that underlies spatial justice issues, to a more performative and experiential cartography — an embodied cartography. If conventional cartographic communication asks audiences to “see the map,” embodied cartography invites participants to “be the map.” This can have a greater affective impact on advocacy goals. To illustrate this trajectory, I will discuss several projects from my work in the expanded fields of art and mapping. These include a participatory work Sharjah InfoCart/CityMap (2011), in which my collaborator and I invited residents of Sharjah, UAE to contribute to a map of the city that reflected their lived experience. In a recent body of work, Walking the Watershed (2016-ongoing), participants “perform the map,” embodying the uneven social relations within New York City’s water infrastructure.
Geographic Information, Popular Visualization, and the Regionalization Problem
Garrett Dash Nelson
In both casual and scholarly descriptions of the geographic pattern of the world, we tend to describe discrete spatial entities which, having some sort of bounded territorial extent, comprise a set of recognizable “places.” The most familiar method of constructing these bounded entities is through political geography, where legal borders between administrative units form the spatial definition of places. However, with the rise of “scientific” approaches to geography, sociology, demography, ecology, and related fields in the nineteenth century, both researchers as well as political reformers have proposed alternative systems for creating spatially bounded entities, relying on empirical appeals to patterns ranging from hydrology to labor market economics in order to draw regional units on the map. Increasingly, large-scale geographic data sets came to underlie the empirical study of regionalization, providing the impetus for some of the very first computational methods in spatial analysis and providing the basis for “objectively” defined units such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s metropolitan statistical areas. Visualizing this information—both the underlying data as well as the proposed new systems of geographic units—became essential to the methodology of the regionalization problem. In turn, popular visualization became the conduit for making public arguments in favor of these new geographies, which circulated with the goal of convincing both policymakers and the general public alike to reconsider their attachment to legacy geographies inherited from the past. In this talk, I will examine a variety of cartographic productions which aimed to draw new kinds of “edges” on the map as a wide variety of scientists, statisticians, bureaucrats, reformers, and others attempted to realign geographic units away from politics and towards the supposedly rational patterns found in data.
Legitimizing administrative statistics in XIXth Century France: The Albums de Statistique Graphique in Context, their Aims and Audiences
Gilles Palsky
The albums de statistique graphique of the French Ministry of Public Works, a series of statistical atlases published from 1878 to 1906, have been discovered and rediscovered a few times, until "Data Viz", in search of its tradition, made them one of its historical markers. The admiration that surrounds them stems above all from the graphic achievement they represent, crowning a teeming century of graphic and cartographic innovation. The aim of this paper is not to comment on this graphic dimension, which has already been done elsewhere, but to place the ASGs in their context, along two main lines. Firstly, by explaining how the albums contributed to the construction of statistical objectivity, then by analyzing the objectives assigned to them and the audiences they targeted, based in particular on the introductory texts of the albums written by Émile Cheysson. In the end, it appears that the series of albums did not really meet their objectives, and this despite its high financial cost, which no doubt explains its extinction at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Zero Cartography: Abstraction and Representation in the Time Charts of Joseph Priestley
Daniel Rosenberg
In the 1760s, the natural philosopher and theologian Joseph Priestley published two influential timelines, the Chart of Biography and the New Chart of History. Both were inspired by cartographic models. Both also, in crucial ways, rejected them. Priestley’s charts were maps of chronology not geography, of time not space. Indeed, the Chart of Biography omitted geography, while the New Chart of History reimagined it in a striking abstraction. Drawing on the associationist psychology of David Hartley, Priestley argued that assertions about time are inherently spatial. Thus, the challenge was to realize an analogy between the spatial metaphors implicit in chronology and the graphic space of the chart. Priestley addressed this challenge through a reduction of cartographic vocabulary to only straight lines and color fields. The implications of this experiment are hard to overestimate. Not only did Priestley’s charts pioneer new directions in infographics in general, in their treatment of geography, they highlighted the abstraction inherent in all cartographic representation.
How Richard Edes Harrison Mapped Information
Susan Schulten
Richard Edes Harrison was one of the most influential mapmakers in mid-twentieth century America. From the 1930s through the 1960s, he produced stunning maps and graphics that introduced Americans to a new sense of global geography. In his hands, maps became instruments to advocate an internationalist posture that in a new age of distance brought by the advent of aviation. Through hundreds of images that appeared in newspapers, magazines, atlases, books, and even military training manuals, Harrison departed from traditional methods of mapmaking to embrace a unique design aesthetic that would more intuitively convey a new era of American stewardship. These unconventional images resonated not only with the public, but also with geographers, military strategists, and business leaders. From his origins as an accidental mapmaker for Time and Fortune magazine through the growing geopolitical crises that exploded in the Second World War and the subsequent Cold War, Harrison consistently experimented with visual techniques to convey what traditional maps could not: a rapidly shifting landscape of economics, technology, and political power.
Historical maps as data for research and communication on past, present and future landscapes
Jan Trachet
This paper will show how the landscape-archaeological research of a sixteenth-century painted map of the coastal landscape of Bruges (Belgium) plays a pivotal role in studying not only the lay-out and morphology of the late-medieval landscape, but also in the heritage management of the current landscape, as well as in the the strategic landscape planning of the future coastal plain.
Between 1561 and 1571, painter-cartographer Pieter Pourbus mapped the territory of the castellany of the Liberty of Bruges with a very large dimension (620 x 335 cm) and scale (1:12000), depicting thousands of houses, mills and castles and kilometers of roads, dikes and paths in detail. Our study (initially) aimed to evaluate the topographic accuracy of the map and to validate its application as a landscape-archaeological data-source for heritage management. Indeed, archaeological spot-checking confirmed that the depicted topography represents a historical reality and thus uprates the map as a valuable source for cultural resource management of the current landscape. By integrating the georeferenced and vectorized map into a touchable-application, visitors can discover the landscape-archaeological treasures themselves. A first by-product of this research was the integration of the map in a series of paleo-geographical maps, reconstructing the 2000-year old harbour landscape north-east of Bruges. Thus the map features in a large augmented reality scale model, a cycling app, and a touch-table application. In a second spin-off of this research, environmental psychologists and communication experts evaluate how the above (map-) applications contribute to the perception and time-depth of the changing coastal landscape. Hence, the map also plays a role in increasing the public engagement and participation in the sustainable transition of the future coastal area.