Cartotopia: An Atlas of Artificial Intelligence Maps - Clancy Wilmott, University of California

Cartotopia: An Atlas of Artificial Intelligence Maps
Clancy Wilmott, University of California, Berkeley
This paper presents a snapshot of preliminary findings from Cartotopia, an ongoing atlas project which uses historical and contemporary cartography and imagery to interrogate the power of both cartography and visual computation through a series of artificial intelligence maps. Drawing from sources such as the Library of Congress’ Panoramic Mapping Collection, the USGS’s DEM imagery, the Sanborn mapping collections, and the Ordnance Survey, it argues that the historical conditions of cartography-from production to analytic potential-are folded into machine learning through both cartographic and computational abstraction and generalization, revealing ongoing politics that linger in the dataset regardless of permutations.
This presentation was made at the 2023 annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). For more information on NACIS, check out NACIS.org.