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reading
this is a list of articles i have read online. i read using the instapaper app so that i can track my highlights, which can be seen below each article header. the list updates once per day and has been tracking since october of 2021.
Data experiences are about inclusion: thinking about the canyon of erasure, exclusion, and inaccessibility
read on March 31, 2025 at 04:10PM
1 highlights
- Marion Lean, whose 2020 PhD thesis was titled “Materializing Data Experience” is focused on a wonderful and provocative ethos for why “data experiences” are worth it: they include people in meaningful experiences. Lean’s entire thesis focuses on this ethical dimension, framed from a feminist direction, as an imperative for understanding that human-to-data relationships are interactive and can produce deep and meaningful experiences. And that if we take this for what it can accomplish, then the best use of data experiences are towards including people who have been excluded or left at the margins.
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Truth & Beauty - Crisis? What crisis?
read on March 31, 2025 at 04:02PM
4 highlights
- I think, there’s an interesting dichotomy at play: After COVID, people are now way more used to dashboards and charts. Good! But, there’s a even higher expectation for at-a-glance, shareable, bite-sized content that clicks immediately.
- But if you squint your eyes a bit, you can see how these popular pieces seem to fall into two classes: Simple, catchy graphics or short animations: Easy-to-personalize “apps” Should I rent or buy Chronotrains Apple Health “Rings” …
- in order to make the investments worthwhile, rather than treating data visualization as a single-use artifact, we should always also think about how our work can continue to grow after we move on: Choose technologies that are open source and have a good shelf life. Build tools and frameworks that allow others to continue the work. Create modular, adaptable solutions that provide long-term value to clients and organizations. Involve users and other creators early on, so they see how things are made, grow to co-own the results and ideally carry on the torch!
- Let’s look ahead — how can we integrate data visualization into broader storytelling formats—games, AR/VR, generative experiences? How can we provide beautiful and helpful ambient information displays? Are the ubiquituous chat formats really our enemies? Or rather an opportunity to rethink dialog-based data experiences? etc etc etc.
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beyond the plateau: the next decade with physical data experiences, a hopeful reimagining - Shirley Wu
read on March 31, 2025 at 03:55PM
4 highlights
- If we want to push our creativity forward, we need to broaden our scope of “proper” data visualization, or even our scope of data art. In fact, I am convinced that what we currently consider “Unusual” will drive our next cycle of experimentation and innovation. But Shirley, you might say, the “Unusual” category encompasses sonifications, physicalizations, smellifications. Those aren’t data visualizations. And you’re absolutely right. Which is why I want to take it one step further: not only do we need to broaden our scope, but we also need to redefine what we stand for. Recently, I’ve become a fan of the term “data experiences.”
- So I’m defining data experience as anything that enables us to personally encounter data as a way to expand our personal and collective knowledge. I like this definition because it is intentionally broad and inclusive. It can contain within it data visualizations, sonifications, physicalizations, smellifications, or things we have yet to define and be inspired by.
- Sarah Emery Clark, in her response to my last post, summarizes it best: “We connect more deeply to information when it’s in relationship with our physical experiences. We process differently — connecting the dots — when ‘doing’ and ‘thinking’ happen simultaneously.”
- “For a product or project to have influence — both on the industry [level] and in the public’s mind — many people have to be able to see it and experience it. Data storytelling is ultimately a cultural product, and cultural products require some amount of audience reach, and a number of subsequent activities that follow like discussion, conversation, and debate, in order for that cultural product to have meaningful cultural impact.”
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what killed innovation?: the past decade of interactive graphics, a brief recounting - Shirley Wu
read on March 31, 2025 at 03:48PM
1 highlights
- In both of those shifts, there is a common refrain: the demand for easier, quicker, more bite-sized content. It’s underpinned by a cultural shift towards mobile phones as our primary mode of content consumption. The shift, as RJ notes, has shrunk the canvas, trained audiences to engage in short bursts, and has generally “made the Internet a not-fun place to hang out.” Matt of The Pudding echoes this observation: Audiences want more video and images that can fit on Instagram, “which means it can’t carry too much detail on mobile phone screens.”
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Keep coming back
read on March 26, 2025 at 09:30PM
1 highlights
- Is it really revolutionary to remind people to have local clubs, groups, and hangouts to show up to on a semi-weekly basis that don’t cost a lot of money? Unfortunately, in the context of the private equity simulation we increasingly live in, the answer is: yes, it is. This function used to be filled by churches, sports leagues, civic groups and even restaurants and bars — all things that are on the decline in what Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently dubbed The Anti Social Century. We now have to be actively on the look out for ways to connect. We have to act counter-culturally to this moment.
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How to find new spiritual practices | Psyche Guides
read on March 20, 2025 at 08:56PM
3 highlights
- Like nearly a quarter of US adults, you might even think of yourself as ‘spiritual but not religious’. It’s a complicated term, no doubt, but one that reflects how a shift away from religious participation does not equal a rejection of spiritual needs and practices
- One of the roots for the word ‘spirituality’ is spiritus, meaning ‘breath’.
- spiritual practices emerged as tools of orientation and grounding
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A Brave and Startling Truth: Maya Angelou’s Stunning Humanist Poem That Flew to Space, Inspired by Carl Sagan
read on March 15, 2025 at 02:25PM
2 highlights
- Sagan limned Earth as a “pale blue dot.” That became the moniker of the photograph itself and the title of his bestselling book published later that year, in which he wrote that “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives” on this “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
- A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH by Maya Angelou
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18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian
read on March 15, 2025 at 02:25PM
4 highlights
- as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
- Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting
- Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.
- Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
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