Given funding uncertainty, we wrote about why depts & faculty should try to communicate openly with PhD applicants about any changes to their admissions processes, including if it's "nothing has changed". Let's do what we can (when we can) to prevent cascading anxiety. cra.org/crn/2025/09/...

Listen, everyone's mad that ChatGPT 5 can't capture the full nuance of their discipline. But what about its potential to rapidly develop compelling, engaging visuals for education? It took me only a single prompt to create this emoji-based multiplication table for my child.

I feel terrible for the students described in this article, because they bought into the lie that they've been hearing from politicians for years - don't study humanities, study computers, and you will get a job. All these students did was listen to what we told them. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/t...

I learned about Bill Collins today, CU's 1st black football captain. This image captures Bill at the 1969 Liberty Bowl coin-toss, standing in front of an all-white, never-integrated Alabama team that brought 40 players to stand opposite him. ▶️ youtu.be/RBNX8L5RTIA?... 🔗 cubuffs.com/news/2025/8/...

As I start building infrastructure for year 2 of my growing group, a shout-out to @jonfroehlich.bsky.social and the @makeabilitylab.bsky.social handbook for helping me reason through the implicit processes & practices that should be more visible to our lab. 🔗 docs.google.com/document/d/1...

This wild AI example just happened to me + a colleague trying to decide on "wellbeing" or "well-being" for public material. Depending on query framing, Google gives inverse recommendations for US audiences! Almost as if its inferring my preference from order and trying to make me happy 🤔

As a fellow "personal & local vis" evangelist, this article is rich with great examples.

ChatGPT is out here gifting my research to other folk today... > "Studies like “Data is Personal” (Kovacs et al., 2019) show that data framed to reflect local or personal experience increases trust and perceived relevance." (unfortunately, I'm actually flattered it surfaced in an unrelated query)

The visual design in this article is just straight-up gorgeous.

Dug up the paper (left) the WPost vis (right) is based on to see how they presented the same data. It's fascinating to me how subtle color differences can shape the spatial patterns we see. (I can't quite figure out why more of Houston seems to be rising in the paper than the WPost article 🤔)

Chernoff fishes

More awful news. The US has been the leader in scientific research for **80** years due to robust funding for NSF, NIH, and other scientific agencies. All that infrastructure, human capital, and international prestige that we have built over those years is at real risk of just collapsing.

Crushing to hear of more junior colleagues in the computer science & human-computer interaction (HCI) space whose NSF CAREER grants were terminated this week. I'm hopeful that philanthropic funders can find a way to support this generation of scientists studying online manipulation, bias in AI, etc.

This is one of the worst violations of research ethics I've ever seen. Manipulating people in online communities using deception, without consent, is not "low risk" and, as evidenced by the discourse in this Reddit post, resulted in harm. Great thread from Sarah, and I have additional thoughts. 🧵

From my NSF grant that was TERMINATED on Friday for not advancing priorities: "AI literacy is important [...] However, not all relevant learning happens in the classroom, especially since in the United States, many K-12 schools still do not have computing courses." www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/...

Harvard redid its whole homepage to push back against the administration’s demands. I mean, this is just a website but I think it’s kind of a great PR move: www.harvard.edu

This map by @insidehighered.com, with downloadable data that has links to sources, shows every school where students have had visas revoked. And yes, CMU has had 7 revoked. 1 in 3 students and 1 in 4 faculty are foreigners here in the US. This is terrorism on our campuses.

Got around to pushing all my @cuboulder.info Web Data Science @jupyter.org notebooks to @github.com Enjoy! github.com/cuinfoscienc...

I'm just a small-town professor. I'll never be a provost or chancellor. But here's some free advice: we're about to hold the most watched college sports event in 🇺🇸. Every college president should be all over TV, at every game, explaining why the March Madness of federal budget cuts is a huge crisis.

🤩

I always shock my students a bit when I tell them that quantitative data is just qualitative data that has already been interpreted numerically.

We have two job openings in the Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Non tenure-track, of interest for those who work in cultural studies or critical media, don't mind a full-time lecture schedule, and enjoy working with grad TAs. It's a three-year renewable post. Please circulate!

The interactivity in this article is 🪄. While I teach all these topics in my vis course, being able to play with each concept is a wonderful amplifier to understanding.

The NIH capping the indirect cost rate (IDC) for grants at 15% can best be described as a direct assault on Universities. It’s such a bureaucratic, innocuous sounding thing that actually means that research universities will be kneecapped. Thousands of employees across the US will lose their jobs.

For folks looking for COVID-19 📊, the COVIC archive is a wonderful resource with thousands of COVID-19 data visualizations that appeared on the web. covic-archive.org/index.html

We often share W.E.B. Du Bois's more colorful work, but his annotations in charts like this ensured that positive-trending data did not mask America's social reality. Give me more Du Bois designers right now.

SCOOP: Many of the pages that went missing on Friday from the CDC website on Friday have reappeared — in response to intense media coverage, backlash from the scientific community and concern for the public’s health. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/03/h...

Hey folks - I'm going to delete this post because the graph itself might be misleading 🤦. I need time to look into a bit in case folks start sharing this widely. I'll follow up in a bit.

The entire archive of CDC datasets can be found here. HUGE shoutout to data archivists- this work is important 👏🙌🏻 archive.org/details/2025...

Calling bullshit on their lies isn't censorship. Failed insurrectionists aren't heroes. Fighting racism and helping underserved communities isn't discrimination. Showing empathy isn't evil. Supporting trans kids isn't abuse. Don't accept their twisted frames as reality.

My latest project lets you explore the entire commit history of any GitHub repo ✨ Obviously, D3.js was one of the 1st repos I tested. You can clearly see the 3000+ commits made by its creator @ocks.org! But also @fil.rezo.net & many others. nbremer.github.io/ORCA/commit-...

Since I see a new wave of folks appearing in Bluesky, there are all kinds of public lists to help you find your people from other platforms: blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs They just aren't the easiest resource to discover without someone pointing you to them!

The story of computing is written in its artifacts, in the organizations in which they were forged, and expecially in the people who shaped them.

My new lab is running its first study! Its a little (paid) interview study about data serialization formats (like yaml, json, and friends). Do you have opinions? We'd love to hear them

Are you an early career education researcher? Have you earned your PhD since April 1, 2017? IES has a grant for up to $600K for developing your research, including working closely with a mentor You need to be tenure track at an R1 or R2 Due March 1 ies.ed.gov/funding/pdf/...

WE HAVE LAUNCHED! Please share! After months of recording with amazing scholars, politicians, and artists we kick off our show about #joy and #tech with two awesome launch episodes! First is with @cfiesler.bsky.social about #TikTok and the joy of online communities: open.spotify.com/episode/0KAx...

#BillsMafia (these games are not good for my health)

Our 2024 State of the #dataviz Industry Report summarizes 861 responses about the state of data viz, the people who make it, the challenges they face, and where the field is headed. Full report here:

Rejected by #chi2025? I invite you to contribute to this commiseration playlist. music.apple.com/us/playlist/...

Feeling inspired by an older gentleman with walking sticks in the coffee shop this morning. When asked how far he was walking today, he said "I don't know. I'm just going this direction until I find a store with ice cream" #fitnessgoals

"This is what modern day conquering looks like. And to give yourself an edge, you need to ensure that others are weakened so that you can show your strength. All in the name of empowering free speech."

I've tried every TODO manager under the sun and the only one that I stick with consistently is the giant text file. (very similar Jeff Huang's approach: jeffhuang.com/productivity...)

The Critical Coding Cookbook PDF Reader is now downloadable at criticalcode.recipes/downloads. The 276 pages of delicious reading includes hyperlinks to code examples and it’s printer-friendly 🍥 Special thanks to Munus Shih for turning the website into a book 🍢 #criticalmaking #openknowledge

I love data quirks like this

💡 Ensuring equity in #CSed means recognizing and valuing diversity as a critical part of excellence + innovation! AccessComputing + NCWIT created this free, accessible #BPC resource to help bridge the ♿ disability gap: ncwit.org/improving-equity-and-access-for-graduate-students-with-disabilities

🎉 Congratulations to all CRA undergrad research award winners! Serving on this selection committee is one of my most challenging + rewarding tasks. Their combination of outstanding work, service, and research-vision makes choosing winners near-impossible each year. cra.org/about/awards...

I think that nearly 50% of my followers over the last couple of weeks have been bot-accounts. The "30+ guy who believes supermodels are really into their data nerd posts" demographic must be booming on bluesky.

I ran into a version of this problem working with hockey, where any reader of a spatial viz is going to be influenced by how the sport is played on a white surface. That's part of why I use diverging colourschemes with white as "average" or "normal".

Follow-up example that broke my brain for a second this morning: www.weather.gov/bou/winter All that white? It actually represents a *low* probability of > 0.1" of snow. Totally normal to use white as the low end of a scale.. but here, it just looks like the map is covered in snow