Conference Grant Reports: Alexis Wood at NACIS 2024
We are pleased to support our students sharing their work at the premiere conferences in their field. Alexis Wood presented her database project, State of Mine (Mind), at the North American Cartographic Information Society's (NACIS) annual meeting in Tacoma, Washington.
NACIS is a cartographic society – bringing together academics, government agencies and commercial organizations – in appreciation, development, and explorations in the fields of cartography and GIS. The research and writing of this paper was supported by the Berkeley Center for New Media Summer Research Grant.
The presentation outlined the process of building a spatial database of US state secessionist movements - a two-year process of archival research and ground-truthing conducted in collaboration with a team of undergraduate researchers - and argues for the understanding of these areas as 'affective states'. In doing this, Wood asks the users of the database to recognize the significance of states often branded as 'imaginary' or 'fake' in fundamental aspects of residents' identities (whether the residents actively participate or not) as the territory (and the act of crafting the territory) is integrated in the landscape. The project and resulting spatial database will be published next summer in conjunction with the Leventhal Map Library through their 2024 Early Career Digital Publications Grant.