This August I am running a hands-on workshop for the Wisconsin Land Information Association on Doing Prompt Cartography: Practical LLM Workflows for GIS Professionals.

I am grateful WLIA asked me to do it. They are a great organization, and Wisconsin has always had a strong geospatial community. I am excited to spend some time with people who care about land information, practical workflows, better maps, and the strange new reality that we can now tell software what we want in plain language and, with enough judgment, get surprisingly useful cartographic work back.

The workshop is meant to be practical. We will look at the prompt cartography workflow, use natural language to shape map ideas, work through LLM-assisted GIS tasks, critique outputs, revise prompts, and talk about where human cartographic judgment still matters most. Which, spoiler, is everywhere.

If you plan to attend, signing up for a paid LLM account is strongly suggested so you can get the most out of the session. A $20 monthly account with OpenAI or another major LLM provider should be enough. You do not need to become a machine whisperer before August. You just need access to a capable model and a willingness to experiment.

For those who cannot make the WLIA workshop, especially anyone outside North America, the ICA Map Design Commission and other ICA Commissions will also be running a Prompt Cartography workshop in Brno, Czechia. That one should be a lively international version of the same basic idea: learn by doing, make maps through language, and leave with a workflow you can adapt to your own GIS and cartography work.

And if neither workshop works for your calendar, the book comes out two weeks after the WLIA workshop and is available for pre-order now. Prompt Cartography: Interactive Web Map Design with LLMs is my attempt to turn this whole messy, exciting, still-evolving workflow into something teachable, repeatable, and useful for actual mapmakers.

Happy mapping!

Ian