Welcome to the 2026 GIS in Action Annual Conference hosted by the Oregon & SW Washington Chapter of the Geospatial Professional Network & Cascadia ASPRS.
How do we come to know a place? Often, it is through the view from a road. Highways and familiar routes shape how we see the world, offering glimpses that gradually form our sense of what a place looks like. Traveling familiar routes over and over again can create the feeling that we know the places we pass through. Yet those views are constrained, and much of the surrounding landscape remains unseen. (in)visible Oregon explores this tension between familiarity and partial knowledge. Through viewshed analyses along Oregon’s major highways, the project maps what can—and cannot—be seen from the roads that structure our experience of the state. The resulting map reveals how small the visible world can be compared to the much larger landscapes that remain hidden just beyond the edge of the road. The map invites viewers to reconsider how movement and infrastructure shape our mental maps of place. Some areas appear again and again from many vantage points, while others remain largely invisible despite lying close to heavily traveled routes. This talk will share the ideas behind the project, the process of transforming visibility analysis into a map, and the tools to generate similar analyses elsewhere. By sharing this workflow, the project encourages others to explore what is visible—and invisible—in the landscapes they think they know.
