ICC2015 Pre-Conference Workshop details

The International Cartographic Conference takes place in Rio de Janeiro from 23 to 28 August 2015 (see http://www.icc2015.org/). Decisions on acceptance of papers for the main conference have recently been shared with authors and so you may have started thinking about your travel plans this summer. We hope that in these travel plans there will also be room to participate in the pre-ICC2015 workshops that we are organizing with the Federal University of Paraná in the city of Curitiba, Brazil. These workshops will take place on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 August 2015. This means you will have ample time to travel from Curitiba to Rio de Janeiro, which, by the way, is relatively cheap and only lasts 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Curitiba will host two different one-day workshops through collaborations between ICA Commissions including the Commission on Map Design.

Workshop 1 (on 20 August 2015): Designing and Conducting User Studies
This workshop is co-organized by the ICA Commissions on Use and User Issues and Cognitive Visualization. It is typically a training workshop which is meant for people who want to learn more about how to execute user research. Members of both commissions will moderate a series of teaching modules.

Workshop 2 (on 21 August 2015): Envisioning the Future of Cartographic Research
This workshop is co-organized by four ICA Commissions:  Cognitive Visualization; Use and User Issues; Geovisualization and Map Design. The nature of this interactive workshop is completely different from Workshop 1. It is directed towards making progress on a new research agenda for interactive cartography and geovisualization. Preparations for this workshop have already begun with the involvement of a variety of commission members who made submissions to our call for proposals of what are the current ‘big problems’ in interactive cartography.

We received 19 submissions, some of which had overlaps with others. In the process of narrowing down these topics to what we can reasonably work on in a workshop, the workshop steering committee has decided to see further input from our commissions:

Therefore, whether or not you can come to the workshop, we would like to ask for five minutes of your time before 8 March to rate the topics, which we have distilled into a question or short statement. Please visit our Google Moderator page: https://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=217c5a (click on the View Ideas button to see the questions) and rate each proposal – whether you like or don’t like it. We will then use this as an input to make a final decision on which three or four topics we will choose. These topics will then be posted on the webpage and those attending the workshop can nominate which one they would most like to work on.

After you have done this, we would like to invite you to visit the webpage  http://www.cartografia.ufpr.br/home/

This webpage contains all the information you may need about the two workshops and also offers facilities to register for one or both workshops in Curitiba. We would like to ask you to register a.s.a.p. but, in any case, before 1 July 2015. Registration for our workshops will only be possible through this website and not through the main ICC2015 website.

You will have to book your own travel and overnight accommodation in Curitiba. The website provides information to help you with this.

We hope to welcome many of you in Curitiba this summer!