Cartographic Perspectives (E-Journal - North American Cartographic Information Society, NACIS)
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A Feeling About Ethics
No full textAs you might expect, editing an issue like this has affected how my co-editor Aileen and I think about ethics itself. The collection of case studies in this issue was intended to focus on ethics as a practice rather than a theory. We ended up not including several contributions because they did not focus on that practice—on the agency of acting ethically. Instead, some of these contributions expressed a feeling of non-agency or being wronged, and described how their authors reacted to that experience
Cartographic Considerations for Ethical Rockhounding
No full textWhen does location information on an interactive web map become too detailed and identifiable? In this case study, I discuss the issues that arose when the Washington Geological Survey converted a decades-old printed rockhounding location map into multiple interactive, variable-scale web maps. These issues include topics relating to privacy, land management, rock-collecting laws, and the ethical responsibility of a state agency to consider the many different ways that such maps could be used
Ethical Reflections on Making the Untitled ṮEṮÁĆES Map
No full textTEMOSEṈ (Charles “Chazz” Elliott), a professional artist and carver working from a family studio in W̱JOȽEȽP (Tsartlip) First Nation, and Kim Shortreed, a settler immigrant artist and scholar, teamed up to challenge Western cartographic traditions through Untitled ṮEṮÁĆES, the first prototype of a haptic map, an art/map concept created by Shortreed during his Ph.D. project. Having completed and shown the map at a local gallery, Kim now reflects on the ethics of creative and cultural ownership, toponymic justice, and cartographic colonization
Practical Geospatial Ethics: Concerns, Codes, and Cases
No full textThis paper is one of a diverse set of contributions to a special issue of Cartographic Perspectives focused on cartographic ethics. Throughout it situates cartography within a broader geospatial context and discusses ethics in relation to professional practice in that field. First the paper considers the nature of ethical concerns expressed within the industry, government, and academic sectors of the geospatial enterprise, and speculates on how those concerns have evolved since CP first addressed ethics in the early 1990s. Second, it considers the roles of professional ethics codes and how relevant codes and rules relate to evolving ethical concerns. Thirdly, the paper highlights characteristics of ethics case studies, and the utility of formal case study analysis. It suggests how practitioners’ stories about ethical challenges can be adapted to “actionable” case studies that can be used to hone geospatial professionals’ and organizations’ ethical problem-solving abilities. The paper concludes with arguments that case studies may be key to elevating ethics within cartography and geospatial curricula in higher education, as well as in training large language model AIs to provide reasonable ethical advice to human mapmakers and users
Ethical Challenges in Analyzing and Mapping Historical Demographic Changes and Migration Using Population-Scale Family Trees
No full textDespite the progress made toward generating and utilizing population-scale family trees to study historical population dynamics, little is known about their representativeness for the entire population. In this article, we confront the inherent complexities and biases in historical data collection and shed light on the extensive areas of history that remain unknown, unrecorded, or inaccurately portrayed. Although we do not provide definitive solutions for these data gaps, we aim to initiate a dialogue on these critical issues, contributing to the discourse on ethical data collection and representation in historical research. We first report on the preliminary results of a record linkage experiment between family tree records and a historical census, emphasizing the need for methods that integrate historical data from multiple sources to systematically evaluate representativeness. The experiment reveals significant underrepresentation of certain groups in the United States, notably Native American, Black, and Mexican persons, as well as those from eastern Europe, southern Europe, and Ireland. These findings underscore the ethical responsibilities that should guide historical research, including the need to address underrepresentation and improve methodologies to better reflect the diversity of population dynamics and migration patterns. To complement these efforts, we advocate for the use of interactive story maps to amplify the qualitative narratives of underrepresented populations and integrate them into the broader historical narrative. Our endeavor to map migration and demographic changes is not just about tracing the past; it’s about shaping a more equitable and comprehensive understanding of history that honors the diversity of all its participants
A Discussion on the Ethics of Mapping Place Names for Riverine Forests in Tana River, Kenya
No full textWe are an international group of researchers and conservationists with expertise in biological anthropology, environmental studies, international development, spatial sciences, and community-centered conservation. With over thirty years of combined research and lived experience in the Tana River region of Kenya, local place names for forests and woodlands have been shared with us through personal interactions, participatory mapping workshops, and other community workshops. We present an ongoing discussion about the ethics of publishing local names of sections of riverine forest patches and other locales, especially without inter- and intra-community agreement on these names. This conversation is especially critical for sustainable forest resource utilization, human-wildlife conflict, and biodiversity conservation. We present cartographic options and spatial analysis methods to reconcile the already-published names with the locally-named places and to preserve the privacy of villagers’ activities. Also important are the implications for land ownership, rights, and control that claiming place names may have in this region at this time in history as land rights are presently being negotiated between different ethnic groups and clans. We explore a potential for harmonizing a naming system built upon consensus within the many invested Kenyan communities and anchored in their traditional way of naming places. We acknowledge that an ethical approach would be to publish names used by local people, but this is complicated by lack of local consensus
