GISDay@Stanford: AI, Storytelling & the Living Map

GISDay@Stanford: AI, Storytelling & the Living Map

Join us for an afternoon at the intersection of art, technology, and geography—celebrating the craft and future of cartography through the work and insight of two of its most influential voices.

Allen Carroll
Allen Carroll is the founder of Esri’s ArcGIS StoryMaps team and former Chief Cartographer at the National Geographic Society, where he spent more than two decades shaping the organization’s visual storytelling about place. In 2010, he joined Esri to lead the creation of ArcGIS StoryMaps, a platform that has since enabled hundreds of thousands of individuals and institutions to combine interactive maps with narrative and multimedia content.

He will open the event with A Life in Storytelling with Maps, reflecting on his career designing maps that inform, inspire, and reveal human stories—from the printed atlas and magazine page to dynamic, web-based experiences.

David Rumsey
David Rumsey, founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection and long-time advocate for open access to historical cartography, will deliver the Closing Keynote: AI, Historical Maps, and Making the Passage of a City Visible. Drawing on recent collaborations with Luna Imaging, he will discuss how AI techniques are reshaping the ways we access, analyze, and interpret historical maps. Rumsey will also share his experimental “Burning Man Map of Earth’s Rotation,” a project that turns cartography into a kinetic, time-based artwork—inviting new ways of seeing movement, memory, and place.

Fireside Chat

The event concludes with a Fireside Chat featuring both Rumsey and Carroll in conversation—bridging the worlds of design, storytelling, and machine learning in mapping. Together they’ll explore how we can honor the past of cartography while reimagining its future.

Who should attend: GIS and spatial data professionals, designers, developers, data journalists, historians, librarians, educators, students, and anyone fascinated by the power of maps to tell human stories.

Event Details

• Date: Wednesday, November 19, 2025
• Time: 1:30–4:30 PM (doors open at 1:15 PM)
• Location: David Rumsey Map Center, Green Library, Stanford University
• Cost: Free • Registration required (limited seating)
• Accessibility: The venue is accessible; please indicate any accommodation needs during registration.

Come for the maps, stay for the ideas, leave with new ways of seeing.

Agenda

• 1:30–1:40 PM — Welcome & Opening Notes (Evan) Introductions, housekeeping, and a brief orientation to the Map Center.
• 1:40–2:25 PM — Talk 1: Allen Carroll (Esri; Former Chief Cartographer, National Geographic) A Life in Storytelling with Maps From the golden age of National Geographic to the digital storytelling era at Esri, Carroll reflects on a career spent helping people see the world through maps. He’ll share how design, structure, and emotion work together to turn geography into story—and story into understanding.
• 2:25–2:35 PM — Break Stretch, chat.
• 2:35–3:20 PM — Talk 2: David Rumsey AI, Historical Maps, and Making the Passage of a City Visible: Recent Work with Luna Imaging and the “Burning Man Map of Earth’s Rotation.” Rumsey will unveil his most recent explorations into AI-assisted mapping—collaborations with Luna Imaging and others that push the boundaries of how historical maps can be seen, read, and animated. His “Burning Man Map of the Rotation of the Earth” transforms cartography into performance art, making the invisible motion of our planet visible through place and time.
• 3:20–3:30 PM — Break
• 3:30–4:15 PM — Fireside Chat: David Rumsey & Allen Carroll (Stace Moderator) A moderated conversation on the art of storytelling, the promise of AI, and what it means to make sense of a rapidly changing world through maps. Audience Q&A.
• 4:15–4:20 PM — Closing Notes (Stace) Final thanks, acknowledgments.

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Host or Publisher Stanford Geospatial Center