Two weeks ago, I attended the annual conference of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) in Colorado Springs as part of our ongoing efforts to integrate design thinking into how we teach cartography at Smith. Attendees come from all corners…
October Mystery Map Solution

Only one person submitted a guess to our latest Mystery Map competition. Amazingly enough, this guess was correct for all three variables, so congratulations – again – to Sam Masinter! Here are the winning answers: Variable A: number of scientific*…
First Mystery Map of the Year!

We’re excited to release the first Mystery Map of the 2016-17 academic year! We had plans to create one much earlier in the year, but we’ve been so busy that it feels like we blinked on Labor Day and woke…
Update: When In Rome
Our most loyal readers may remember that we announced a collaborative project with the Smith College Museum of Art back in March. We set off last semester to create a Story Map for their autumn exhibition, When In Rome: Prints…
Upcoming Projects in the SAL
In addition to our regular workshops and the ten classes we plan to work with this semester, the SAL staff have some exciting projects on the plate for this fall! Drones Back in June, the FAA announced new regulations on drone…
Summer science classes in the SAL
For four weeks during July and August, the SAL was abuzz with activity as dozens of high-school students designed web maps on topics ranging from local geology to bird migrations in East Asia. We worked with three different classes in…
Droning in Belize
Back in June, I had the pleasure of spending a week in San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize, assisting the Coral Reef Edventures program, known as Coral Ed for short, with their marine ecology research. For the past 14 years, adventurous…
Wrapping up Web GIS at UMass

Throughout this semester, we’ve been working with a Five College class at UMass called “Community Service with Web-Based Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST)” that Jon was co-teaching. The five Smith students in the class worked on two semester-long projects…
Flying Drones in Popham Beach
Two weeks ago, the SAL team headed to Popham Beach State Park, Maine, with Prof. Bob Newton’s Geomorphology class. Bob has taken his Geomorphology class there for several years to assess erosion at the beach. A major erosion event in…
May Mystery Map Wrap-up

After a series of mystery maps that were cracked within a day, it looks like we finally stumped you! Believe it or not, nobody solved our most recent Mystery Map. We had some good guesses: several people guessed it was simply distance…