Using the Retrospective Approach to Commemorate AutoCarto Six
This paper outlines the bases for using a retrospective approach to re-visit papers published 30 years ago (1983) in the proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Automated Cartography. “AutoCarto Six”, as it is popularly known, is credited with making numerous, significant contributions to the evolution of automated cartography, geographic information systems (GIS), and a number of related fields. In these remarks I discuss how comments by authors on such topics as Thoughts shaping the design of the papers, Derivative attributions, Original contributions, Impacts, What was new in the papers?, and What was different in the papers? represent an innovative, insightful and instructive way to commemorate conference proceedings and other significant productions.