NACIS 2019

Back to the Drawing Board: Manual Techniques for Things You're Already Doing in Illustrator/Photoshop
Presenter: Molly O'Halloran, Molly O'Halloran, Inc.
Sometimes it's helpful to remember that software programs and terminology draw from traditional illustration methods. Cartographers who may feel intimidated by putting brush to paper already have wild skills! To help bridge the divide between technologies, we'll look at examples of common software effects as rendered manually on paper: transparency; masking; vignettes; gradients; bevel & extrude. There's no command-Z on paper, but there are sometimes ways to undo mistakes. Comparing manual techniques to their digital counterparts can help dissolve creative boundaries and give us new ways to think about combining technologies.

Recreating Map Monsters (and Other Useful Design Tips)
Presenter: Vanesa Knoppke-Wetzel
How often do you want to re-create a particular aesthetic/design of a map or graphic you have seen and loved, but you have no idea how to break it down and replicate it? Using map monsters from historic maps as an example, I'll walk through how to break down what you like into digestible elements, and then show how you could go about recreating these elements in Adobe Illustrator - and other current technologies, if time allows.

Making Cartograms and Treemaps with MAPublisher
Presenter: Nat Case, INCase, LLC
In working on an atlas project for National Geographic, I needed to make a few different graphics with proportional areas which were not geographically accurate. I used MaPublisher to guide creation of both conventional hex and square cartograms, and treemap graphs. I will demonstrate examples of both.

Mapping Data with R
Presenter: Courtney Lee, Public Policy Institute of California
We can quickly make maps of what policy data looks like using graphics packages within R, all without using GIS. Learn how to construct maps that visualize elements of the data within a reproducible environment.

Visualizing U.S. Census Bureau Migration Data with parsetR
Presenter: Kati Perry, USAID
Methods of visualizing migration come in many shapes and sizes – parsetR (Bostock, Davies, and Russell) should be among them. I will walk through how I used the parsetR package to visualize county-level migration flows provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. More importantly, I'll explore why using parsetR allows us to draw additional insights from the data by situating the visualization around variables like income and education.

Visual and Interactive Analysis (through maps) for the Data Scientist
Presenter: Mamata Akella, CARTO
CARTOframes is a Python package that enables CARTO's data, analysis, and visualization capabilities to be used by data scientists in their workflows. During this demo, we will explore how to take advantage of cartographic helper methods built into CARTOframes to quickly create interactive web maps inside of a Jupyter Notebook.