An award of $250 is given for the best student paper/presentation presented at the CCA annual conference.
A submission may be co-authored by a faculty member, but the student must have actively participated in the research and have sole responsibility for delivering the paper/presentation.
The entries will be judged by a three person panel including the chair of the CCA Cartographic Education Special Interest Group. Judging will be based on the content and structure of the work and the quality of the presentation. The judges may also take into account the extent of the student’s involvement in the research on which the paper is based, and his or her status (i.e. undergraduate or graduate) and year level.
All student presentations included at the annual CCA conference are automatically entered for the competition.
More CCA Awards & Scholarships
2021 Canadian Cartographic Association Annual Conference Best Student Presentation Recipients
The CCA Executive were very pleased to award two Best Student Presentations from this years Annual Conference held online in May 2021. One to Shane Doddridge from University of Victoria and a second one to Julia Conzon from Carleton University.
On behalf of the CCA we wish them both all the best in their careers in cartography, and hope that they continue to engage with the Association.
- Shane Doddridge from University of Victoria, “Navigating Theory in Toponymy: Approaching Indigenous Place Names in the Chilcotin Region of Canada”
Abstract: The names of geographical features (toponyms) have long been studied across many disciplines, including geography, cartography, anthropology, onomastics, and linguistics. Unsurprisingly there remains little theoretical agreement about how best to approach a study of toponyms, especially in indigenous contexts.
By exploring an ongoing collaborative project to map the place names of the Tŝilhqot’in First Nation in west-central British Columbia, this presentation attempts to navigate a path through (and hopefully beyond) some theoretical traditions towards landing on some practical cartographic applications.
- Julia Conzon from Carleton University, “Towards Co-Producing Web-Based Geospatial Technologies: A Proposal for Clyde River, Nunavut”
Abstract: The production of web-based geospatial technologies has seldom incorporated diverse ontologies and epistemologies into their technical formulation, leaving critical methodological gaps regarding how such diversity should be meaningfully and digitally represented for the intended users. This challenge is acute among Indigenous and Inuit nations because the development of geospatial technologies intending to represent (via modeling and visualizing) local knowledge have often excluded the users.
With strategies and principles pushing Indigenous and Inuit data sovereignty and decision-making, such as the United Nation’s Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples and National Inuit Strategy on Research, community members and representatives must be included throughout the entire process, from project initiation to application. Therefore, as efforts towards reconciliation and self-determination accelerate, academics/practitioners working with Indigenous or Inuit communities will have to devise and deploy deeper iterative and collaborative methods to develop products that better align with knowledge systems of their intended users. In the case of Clyde River hamlet in Nunavut, they are actualizing Inuit self-determination through community-based initiatives. One such project is the Clyde River Knowledge Atlas (CRKA), which was published in 2018 by Clyde River’s Ittaq Heritage and Research Centre in partnership with Carleton’s Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre.
With feedback from existing atlases hosted on CRKA and new data coming from a sea ice monitoring program, this research proposes following mixed methodologies applied within community-based research to co-produce an interactive web-based prototype atlas with Ittaq and community members, contributing to the discourse on meaningful Inuit Knowledge representation.