NACIS 2019

Remapping Tacoma's Japantown History
Presenter: Sarah Pyle, University of Washington-Tacoma
Japanese-American history has largely been forgotten, yet when it is remembered, the focus is on World War II incarceration. The field of Japanese-American history understandably focuses on this trauma, but surely there is more to their history. This project focuses on illuminating the elided history of their everyday lives and experiences through an exploration of the Japanese community in Tacoma, Washington. The two web-maps created by this project expand local understandings of how Japanese-Americans interacted with the city. This project also seeks to provide the public with ground-breaking knowledge on the spatial spread of Tacoma's Japantown, which was previously unrecognized.

Cartographic Accessibility Through History
Presenter: Harrison Cole
For most of its history, cartography has been conceived of as a fundamentally visual discipline. This is perhaps unsurprising given that maps have historically been developed by and for people who are fully sighted. However, this does not mean that maps have been categorically inaccessible to people who are blind or profoundly visually impaired. My talk examines the history of accessible mapping practices as such, as well as maps that were not expressly designed to be accessible to people with visual disabilities, but nevertheless incorporate contemporary accessibility practices, or suggest possibilities for expanding the current accessibility toolset.

Tracing the Path of Empire in an Annual Map Series
Presenter: Jenny Marie Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Co-presenter: Nicholas Chrisman, Editor, Cartography and Geographic Information Science
The General Land Office (later Bureau of Land Management) published an annual map of the United States for approximately 100 years beginning in 1864. Across this century, the map's nature shifted from being a compilation of regional maps showing the extent of federal surveys to a vast national wallmap that emphasized territorial acquisition and federal landholdings. The first map that showed territorial acquisitions (1897) included an error so large that the Commissioner of the General Land Office had to publish a correction. The changing nature of the annual map and the 1898 correction illuminate the concerns of this imperial period.

Routes and Characters: Theorizing, Designing, and Revising Moralized Cartography
Presenter: Marcel Brousseau, University of Oregon
In this presentation I describe my work creating what I call "moralized cartography." I will present drafts of my map "La Bestia," which depicts migration from Central America to the United States by charting Óscar Martínez's 2010 book Los migrantes que no importan. Built with QGIS, this narrative map is inspired and contextualized by multiple sources, including Potawatomi geographer Margaret Pearce's "emotional geographies," early-modern allegorical geographies, 19th-century railroad broadsheets, and early-20th-century tourism maps. As I will show, moralized cartography is intended as a critical practice that explores new forms for literary and cultural analysis in the humanities and social sciences.