For this project, I upcycled a tabletop found in a dumpster and added a hand-carved “map” of the Apalachicola River. The design takes the river and arranges it into a spiral, with the headwaters at the table’s center. I then documented the process in a StoryMap called From Trash to Topographic!, which also highlights the importance of the river and what makes it an interesting place.

The idea of twisting and warping linear map features into a spiral is something I hope to explore further. It could be an interesting solution to rearranging long, linear features like rivers or roads into a more compact shape, saving on space or paper, but without over-generalizing the path into something as abstract as a metro map. The StoryMap was also highlighted by ESRI on GIS Day 2023, which put together a collection of stories featuring nontraditional applications of GIS.