Writing Database

Recently, my wife asked me what birthday cake I wanted. “Haiku cake,” I said. My wife imagined, sketched, designed, and baked a vegan carrot cake of Basho’s classic haiku, “old pond / frog jumps in— / splash.” She made the cake with fresh carrots pulled from our garden.

In this essay, I’m presenting a digital humanities project that’s attentive to the unmet literacy needs of my former students, which began early in their education. This project is collaborative and experimental. We imagine students engaging with this project in a writing classroom, facilitated by an educator.

This essay includes a July 2020 interview with Graphicacy Creative Director Jeffrey Osborn and Lead Data Visualization Designer and Associate Creative Director, Carni Klirs. It’s about their COVID-19 dashboard collaboration with a team at Johns Hopkins University. All quotations in this essay were transcribed from that interview in July 2020.

Tender empiricism, as described by Goethe, offers a complementary way of observing today. It removes the subject/object separation from the process of collecting these observations. Instead of separation, to remain objective, the person doing the observing is aware of their relationship with the object in time and place...

We want to change the way people talk about Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). We invite educators, practitioners, curriculum designers, learners, students, and anyone interested in the field of SEL to share their learning with the community. — UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development

This shows evidence of my acceptance as a Reviews Editor at Design & Culture, a peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis. My term is for three years.

Case Studies: See “behind the curtain” to learn what digital research looks like in practice.

Around the world, volunteer thinkers and makers make Viz for Social Good possible. These “thinkerers” bring their knowledge, skills, optimistic attitudes, and values to data viz projects for the social good. Mission-driven organizations benefit from this collaboration by seeing their data transformed into vivid and shareable stories. Volunteers work on these projects through local chapters that host Hackathon events. They may also volunteer online and submit their work for review by the VFSG team and the partner organization.

To my fellow panelists; like myself, you are here because you believe in the power of data for good. Tell us about your journey with Viz for Social Good...

Japan Food Bank wanted to raise awareness of rising poverty rates in Japan...

Viz for Social Good is hosting hackathons around the world for a volunteer partnership with Kiron, a non-profit based in Germany that supports refugees and their educational goals...

In part one of this blog post, I talked about how visualization can work in hackathon settings. That begins with creating a space for creative thinking. And thinking begins with the individual. Yet telling stories with data is inherently social. For good causes, we often see the best results when diverse peoples convene to communicate, converse, collaborate, and co-create. Below, you can read more about how visualization works like a language, supporting similar purposes as verbal language.

Basho & Friends is an in-progress prototype for an interactive children’s book. Here, children ages 8-13 collaborate with young Basho, the legendary founder of haiku poetry, to become poets themselves. This project exemplifies a “convivial tool,” defined by philosopher Ivan Illich as a platform designed to promote creative expression. Here, we imagine new possibilities for reading, sensemaking, and creative writing based on past forms and ideas. Through poetry, Basho promotes meaningful principles of literacy and sustainability today.

World-changing ideas traveled fluently along the twenty-one inches between William Playfair’s mind and fingertips. Playfair, the eighteenth-century Scottish engineer who invented the bar, pie, and line chart, relied upon an oft-overlooked digital tool: his hand. He plotted each chart with pen and paper...

A book review of Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis, for Design and Culture journal.

Art School Critique presents thoughts about teaching in the creative field. I wrote an essay in a book about design thinking, and how its methods can be used to design effective learning experiences.