2024 Undergraduate Scholarship Winner
Kelby Beyer
Congratulations to Kelby Beyer, this year’s winner of the NACIS Undergraduate Scholarship! Kelby is a recent graduate of the University of Oregon, with a degree in Archaeology and Spanish. Their stunning map of the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden, Netherlands beautifully showcases their impressive cartographic talent and tells an important story of Dutch colonization and plants brought back from colonized regions.
Kelby hopes to use their skills to create visually compelling stories that are accessible to a wide audience, particularly stories that incorporate their knowledge of Spanish and Archaeology. We’re thrilled to have Kelby as part of the NACIS community. Well done, Kelby!
See the mapKelby’s statement:
“My submission is a print map chronology of the architectural expansion of the Hortus Botanicus botanical garden in Leiden, Netherlands. This map constitutes my capstone undergraduate cartography project, and the map uses glows, numbers, and intuitive ordering to walk the reader through the garden’s architectural expansion from 1594 to 2024. Additionally, I included hand-drawn digital plant drawings and captions to provide botanical and historical information contextualizing the Hortus’s architectural expansion, and I designed an infographic to visualize the garden’s geospatial expansion proportionally over time. This project demonstrates my ability to use personal experience, learn new softwares, and ultimately strike a balance between representing rigid architecture and the organic nature of both architectural and botanical change over time.
In terms of drawing from personal experience, I visited the Hortus Botanicus in spring 2023 and was intrigued by the way iconic Dutch horticulture (e.g., tulips, tropical Asian plants) represent diplomatic histories (e.g., the tulip as a gift from Turkey, tropical plants brought back from Asia during Dutch colonization necessitating glasshouses during brisk Dutch winters). Almost exactly a year later, I decided to explore those international relationships via cartography.
In terms of learning softwares, my project is unique because I hand-digitized detailed drawings of garden buildings from historical maps in Adobe Illustrator. For reference, the modern garden extent is three hectares and I hand-digitized all six historical and contemporary buildings/gardens at a scale permitting less than one meter of error. Finding historical maps to digitize required comprehensively searching historical databases from multiple Dutch organizations, including the Hortus Botanicus and Leiden University. Furthermore, I hand-drew three different plants from the Hortus’s online plant database, which required learning how to use Adobe Fresco (a digital art application) with Adobe Illustrator as well as interfacing files between an iPad and desktop computer.
This map demonstrates my science and history communication foci as a cartographer and how my undergraduate education influences my cartography. I graduated from the University of Oregon with a BS in Anthropology (Archaeology) and a BA in Spanish (Literature) in June 2024. My education taught me that most things have interconnected histories that are especially compelling when shown visually. For example, my archaeological training enabled me to research historical site maps to digitize off of, and Spanish courses about colonial histories allowed me to understand how Dutch colonization in Asia directly affected the Hortus Botanicus in Europe.
While I received constructive critique from Carolyn Fish, University of Oregon InfoGraphics Lab members, and classmates, I’m ultimately responsible for this map’s concept, execution, and willingness to take a chance on an unconventional map design, learning new softwares, and the extremely time-intensive nature of a project requiring extensive digitization within the 11-week time constraint of this class. This project demonstrates that I’m a strong cartographic professional because, in addition to wielding an RDBMS well, I can research, draw, and use unconventional methods to ultimately communicate a relevant story.”