Our monthly speaker series, Map Chat, continues this semester with distinguished UW–Madison alum Brad Andrick! Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, March 20 at 11 a.m. central time.
With a talk titled “Seeing Everything: Digital Cartography and Strategies for Visualizing Large Datasets,” Brad will discuss map visualization techniques, datasets, and much more.
(Are you the kind of person who needs to read the full abstract? Here you go: “Datasets today can be big, sometimes really big. Visualizing data at these large scales introduces unique challenges – particularly when a user is asking to see all of that data at once. The discussion presented here will address two aspects of the problem: technical limitations of rendering and the limited ability to derive useful insights from looking at such high data volumes on a map. The first part of the talk will discuss map visualization techniques including scale visibility, feature simplification, clustering, icon overlap, heatmaps, and aggregations. The second part will present an overview of several map rendering libraries and tooling combinations showing each one’s ability and limitations to render increasingly large datasets. These will include canvas based renderers (leaflet), webGL based renderers (maplibre, openLayers), dynamic vector tiles with postGIS + mvt queries, and heavy DB + vega server side rendering. Example applications will be shown for each to demonstrate their capabilities ranging from rendering thousands of features up to millions.”)
About Brad
Brad Andrick is a seasoned Senior UI/UX Frontend Engineer with Element84; he specializes in geospatial application development and digital cartography. Leveraging over a decade of experience that bridges design, development, and mapping, he has led impactful user-centered geospatial projects for diverse clients in both the public and private sectors ranging from bootstrapping applications for startups and small nonprofits to working on larger teams to develop applications with Fortune 500 companies. Through his work at Element84, he continues to collaborate on identifying emergent technologies to drive advancements across industries and engages with the community by speaking at conferences and working to advance the field of geospatial software development with design. He holds an MS in Cartography & GIS from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a BS in Geographic Science from James Madison University.