Alan McConchie: Visualizing the Past, Building Tools for the Future

We're really honored to have the epic Alan McConchie give a presentation at USF. This is in partnership with USF (http://vgl.cs.usfca.edu/)'s Data Visualization Speaker Series (http://vgl.cs.usfca.edu/events/about.html).

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Alan McConchie

Lead Cartographer, Stamen Design (http://stamen.com)

@mappingmashups (http://twitter.com/mappingmashups)

Visualizing the Past, Building Tools for the Future: Designing an Interactive Atlas of American History

Alan McConchie works at the intersection of cartography, software, and data science. He has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Mathematics, and studied Geographic Information Systems at Hunter College in New York. He is currently Lead Cartographer at Stamen Design, and a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His dissertation research uses OpenStreetMap (http://openstreetmap.org/) as a case study to understand the social dynamics of crowdsourced mapmaking online.

He loves making cartographic visualizations that reveal new ways of seeing the world, and is passionate about creating tools that help people create their own maps and tell their own spatial stories. He is on twitter at @mappingmashups (http://twitter.com/mappingmashups), where he hosts a monthly twitter discussion called #geowebchat (http://mappingmashups.net/geowebchat). His first and (so far) most famous programming project is the Pop vs Soda (http://popvssoda.com/) page.

For the past year, Stamen Design (http://stamen.com/) has been working with the University of Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab (http://dsl.richmond.edu/) to build the American Panorama, a series of interactive maps of American history. In this presentation, Alan will showcase the first four maps of the Panorama, which cover the forced migration of enslaved people (http://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/forcedmigration) before the Civil War, migration across the Overland Trails to the West, the movement of people and goods through canals, and the immigration of people to the U.S. (http://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/foreignborn) from 1850 to today.

Schedule
6:30–7:00 Doors open, socializing, food, drinks
7:00–8:00 Speaker's presentation
8:00–9:00 More socializing, Q&A

Venue

We will be meeting at USF's McLaren Hall, which is accessible via the Muni 5 or 31 buses. Here's a map to guide you to the hall on campus:

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