Hi, I am Tim Prestby. I earned my B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) studying Cartography and Geographic Information Systems as an honors student. I also earned a minor in environmental studies.
I found my passion for geography in my second year as an undergraduate when studying abroad at Wageningen University. The fall of my third year, I changed majors to cartography/GIS year, and got involved in research on big data visualization with the Geospatial Data Science Lab at UW-Madison. In Spring, I wrote a proposal to study neighborhood isolation using big data of human mobility and received the Hilldale Undergraduate Grant to fund my Honors Senior Thesis.
I also got involved with research through the UW Seagrant related to State Coastal Web Atlases. I performed a competitive analysis, conducted a user survey, and analyzed the results. Over the course of my last two years at UW, I worked as the web developer for the UW Cartography Lab website and got to improve my front-end programming skills. Another project I worked on with the UW Cartography Lab focused on design considerations for map-based visual stories. My senior year, I worked as a teaching intern for the interactive cartography class and got a glimpse at the challenging, yet rewarding life of a teaching assistant.
I am excited to continue to research map-based visual storytelling at Penn State. I hope to work on projects that connect theory to practice as visual storytelling continues to grow across journalism and other disciplines.