NACIS 2019

Command Line Carto
Presenter: Dylan Moriarty, Wall Street Journal
Using the command line can feel like a bad 90's text adventure game sometimes. It's intimidating, not particularly friendly, and frustrating as heck. But – it's also powerful and can save you many hours of rote work if learned. Make robots that do your work for you! I'll be talking about how someone with no prior terminal experience can learn command line, some basic Mapshaper commands, how to store your commands for later, and where to go to learn more.

Take Home a Bag of Tricks and Scripts for Automated Mapmaking
Presenters: Denise Lu and Rebecca Lai, New York Times
We will share a list of scripts that we use to make automated maps at The New York Times graphics team, featuring tools like Mapshaper, GDAL, Node canvas, turf.js and ogr2ogr.

Mapping the Rivers of North America (In Bulk!)
Presenter: Alexander Fries, The University of Alabama
This past summer, as part of an effort to update a book discussing the vast and varied river systems of North America, the UA Cartography Lab was tasked with creating nearly 200 maps of watersheds found across the continent. In this presentation, I'll describe the process I developed to streamline the production of this large volume of maps, as well as some of the tricks and techniques I implemented in the workflow to ensure that each map retained a sense of quality and individuality that helped reinforce the great uniqueness and diversity of North America's river systems.

The Art of Cartography: Upping Your Design Game With MAPublisher
Presenters: Nick Burchell, Avenza and Hans van der Maarel, Red Geographics
Making maps is as much an art as it is a science. This presentation will provide an overview of new tips and tricks for cartographic production with the dynamic duo of MAPublisher and Adobe Illustrator, and show how having the unique combination of a GIS system completely within the powerful Adobe design environment allows you to take your maps to the next level. Learn more about the tools many of your favorite cartographers are using to make unique and beautiful maps. Nice? Nice!

Screenshot for the Win
Presenter: Tim Meko, The Washington Post
In a fast-paced news environment, it's important to work quickly and efficiently. At the Washington Post, we use plenty of specialized programs and workflows to make maps, but the humble screenshot is one of the best tools in our cartographic toolbox. This one trick saves us time and energy in breaking situations and is a smart hack for solving some of the sneakiest problems we face day-to-day. Screenshots have also been the foundation of some of our largest mapping projects. I'll walk through how we use screenshots at the Post, as well as some of the advantages and pitfalls.