Powerful data mural in Berlin: artist Susanne Kunjappu-Jellinek commemorates the 136 people who were killed while trying to escape over the wall from GDR. Each flower represents one individual, and the text highlights escape as a form of resistance. www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/sites/184...

HUGE: This summer, countless scientists & technologists can travel to hug their families again after a federal court suspended a Trump administration censorship-at-the-border scheme targeting people working online safety. 🎉 Many thanks to all who worked on this 🎉 knightcolumbia.org/content/fede...

New work from SDU using Media Could to help study where Danes get their news in an election season, where political elites post (& partisanship), and related chatbot use. Great example of cross platform work to understand an information ecosystem more. findresearcher.sdu.dk/ws/portalfil...

Comments due by Monday on the attempt to politicize science/aka kill American research as we know it. Do it at the link (counter the ton of Heritage-foudnatoin-prompted comments): www.regulations.gov/document/OMB...

This is the kind of World Cup reporting I love: local, contextual, and joyful in the way it connects us to our neighbors. This massive media event has been a welcome break from all the violent nationalist rhetoric in the US. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/22/m...

Excited to share that we are now inviting proposals for our upcoming Critical AI Studies? conference at @ucsantabarbara.bsky.social on Oct. 9&10, 2026. Please see the full CfP here: huml.ucsb.edu/conference. Submissions are due July 31, 2026. For questions DM me or @owenleonard.bsky.social.

Congrats to the DPLA for their new Humanity AI award 👏🏽 In "Community Data" I talk about libraries' data literacy work and support of my own creative data approaches. They definitely should "play a central role in shaping how artificial intelligence enters public life". dp.la/news/dpla-to...

Insightful new published work from my colleague Myo Chung & others "found that disclosing AI use does not reduce message, author, or source credibility". So helpful to learn more about the impacts of AI disclosures in news! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Funding Opp: We (Data Theatre Collaborative) wabt to see what you think community data theatre can be! With Association of Theatre in Higher Education we're offing pilot grants for faculty, students, artists, community orgs, and civic folks. 📆 Apply by Oct 1 www.athe.org/page/dtgrants

denying a visa to the man who imitates a statue of a man we assassinated

Just a few days to get your Computation + Journalism 2026 submission in! "News Beyond the Newsroom" at *Northwestern* Oct 2nd-3rd. So sad I'll be missing this one. www.cj2026.northwestern.edu/cfp/

The Data Theatre Collaborative is prepping new community performances about food security for early Aug. So excited to be invited to rehearsals again, looking at SNAP and food bank data in the Boston area.

Remember that every Big Data / AI revolution is powered by an army of under paid global workers with strong domain specific expertise… the World Cup is no exception!

For those looking at their NEH grant reinstatement, highly recommend looking at the Award Reinstatement Instructions, which are much more specific about what is/isn't a change of scope, what budget changes need approval (nothing w/in 25% of total award), & what staffing needs approval.

Is your newsroom considering buidling a social media bot? Read the behind-the-scenes of how I made @ourcup.info to recommend ways you can connect with your immigrant neighbors around world cup games! On Storybench now www.storybench.org/does-your-ne...

Amazing performance by 🇨🇻 with a draw against 🇪🇸!!! Boston has one of the biggest US populations of Cabo Verdians. So happy for my neighbors 🎉

News: I’ll be doing this Professor thing for a while 😄🎉 Giant hugs & thanks to amazing partners, colleagues & mentors who’ve supported me and given me opportunities on the way to tenure. I hope I can meet the high bar to create impact & nurture future academics and practitioners across the domains.

Last night, we of @bostonwomenssports.com went to watch the Haiti v Scotland men’s World Cup match at Little Haiti Intl. restaurant thanks to a VERY fun app “Our Cup” @ourcup.info by @rahulbot.bsky.social! It tells you who your neighbors cheer for! dataculture.northeastern.edu/ourcup/#inte...

Big news! The rest of the year I'll be in Europe with the @uclab.bsky.social at FH Potsdam. My first sabbatical & I'm excited to catch my breath 😮‍💨 Are you in Europe & looking to book your fall speaker series? Invite me to talk about arts-based community data, computational journalism and AI, etc. 📬

The World Cup is on! I built a bot that recommends games to watch based on who lives near you in the US. Just mention @ourcup.info in a post with your zipcode and it'll reply in a min or two. Try it out & learn about your neighbors.

Hey @ourcup.info what World Cup games should I watch in 02144?

As always, @globalvoices.org is here with all the critical cultural context I need to understand this viral hit 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

The World Cup is here!!! Honored to be playing at local FanFests around Boston with my Brazilian drum troop. Come and watch the games with us this week 🎉 Fri: Fan Fest Boston @ 2pm Sat: Fan Fest Everett @ 5pm Sun: Fan Fest Chelsea @ 12:30pm, 3pm, 6pm

New in PN: A noxious orange cloud looms over the World Cup "At the heart of the event lies a dispiriting contradiction: The Cup is supposed to unite the world in a spirit of joy, yet it’s being hosted by a xenophobic, bigoted president who has done everything he can to shut US doors to the world."

Could a genAI chatbot help train more solutions journalists? @elcolectivo506.bsky.social and Reynolds Journalism Institute are trying to find out 🤔 luzlab.org

NYC data people: the @datavandals.bsky.social pop-up newsstand at 51st & Lexington looks amazing! These kinds of IRL data experiences are related to the sort of things I'm trying to do with newsrooms to bring data journalism off-screen. Check their calendar and pop by. datavandals.com/newsstand

By deleting these posts, UNC administrators have also taken a stance on political and social issues. They have declared that they tolerate bigotry and that the voices of conservative activists matter more than those of the majority of North Carolinians. Cowards! www.newsobserver.com/news/local/e...

Tech-oriented journalists are sharing reusable AI skills to help with automation tasks. @jamditis.bsky.social hosts a big collections. These intrigue me & provoke thinking about some kind of shared system for evaluating how useful they are in practice... thumbs-up/down? reviews? skills.amditis.tech

Our next Data Craft Circle is around the corner! Join us next week on June 7 at 3pm GMT to work on your latest analog data experience in our shared space. Register for free on Eventbrite: buff.ly/bGlkTRI

The most underreported story in America today is the extent to which neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates have taken over the Republican Party.

[JOB] Our Data Theatre Collaborative needs help in Boston! Do you know a theatre or arts admin? Will help manage and grow our work in participatory performance, data viz, civic engagement. Around 20 hour/week, $30/hour, from now through Nov 2027. northeastern.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/careers/job/...

How can off-the-shelf tech help hyperlocal newsrooms assess their coverage against their mission? Older work (finally) published in News Research Journal, with former Scope editor @thescopenu.bsky.social & @megheckman.bsky.social. "A content audit case study" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Here's some random conference observations from what I'm seeing at @icwsm.bsky.social 🧵

I'm off to @icwsm.bsky.social this week, presenting our new dataset @mediacloud.bsky.social paper. This documents the datasets, and context, of our re-engineered online news archive and the directory of media sources that feeds it. Come say hi if you're here too. 👋🏽 ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...

I didn’t know about the earliest origin of Memorial Day until I was a grown-ass man —because some folks didn’t want us to. 2021: Memorial Day organizers cut the mic of retired Lt Col Kemter as he discussed how formerly enslaved Americans exhumed remains of soldiers to give them proper burials. 🧵

Went to an anti AI datacentre protest march today and a friend of mine got a picture that summed it all up

ICYMI for US data wranglers: CT changed from counties to "planning regions" and that's been rolling out across census data over the last few years. I'm updating an my our-cup app for this year's World Cup and (surprise!) needed to update my static list of counties 😤 firstlogic.com/insights/con...

So much attention has been paid to the Musk v. Altman trial. But real accountability for the AI industry will not come from a billionaire mudfight. It will come from the movements around the world resisting the empires of AI. My op-ed for @theguardian.com. www.theguardian.com/technology/c...

Lucky to participate in a wonderful workshop from local artist Laidy Saenz on making Incan-inspired Quipu to tell our own histories of migration. The activity led to sharing of some amazing stories of the journeys of my immigrant neighbors. A lovely invitation to make and share 👏🏽

Another set of work from my data storytelling students . We played with making data sonifications with TwoTone as an in-class exercise. They found it fun and interesting , but not very strong in narrative capacity. 🤔 Here's a video demo with snippets

Shoutout for CNN web editors for bringing us the headline of the day 👏🏽🤦🏽‍♂️

Remember the outrage over the "um" quote from the NYT AOC-in-Munich Feb story? I checked it out: just 8 of 36k (!) quotes that day across popular US news included um or ah 🤔 My latest in Storybench shows how I did it & connects to racial/gender news biases www.storybench.org/whose-quotes...

Today we're launching the Northwestern Agentic AI Investigative Journalism Challenge. Top prize is $5000 and an invitation to present the work at the Computation + Journalism Symposium this fall. Details here: www.gain-agent-challenge.northwestern.edu

Computation + Journalism 2026 is scheduled! "News Beyond the Newsroom" at *Northwestern* Oct 2nd-3rd. So sad I'll be missing this one, but you should get on the mailing list for updates and start working on a submission! www.cj2026.northwestern.edu/cfp/

Random new work: recently I took a super-fun weekend "Steampunkinetics" class with Bruce Rosembaum and I made some pieces I'm proud of! More photos at www.connectionlab.org/studio-art

Boston friends: I'm honored to be invited with Grooversity to play at the @bostonlegacyfc.com "Noite Brasil" on Tuesday @ Gillette Stadium! Marta vs. Gutierres ⚽️🎉🪘See you there! Special discount tix www.gofevo.com/event/Groove...

I can really relate to this: "The Curiosity rover drilled into a 28.6 lb rock on Mars on April 26, 2026. The rock got stuck to the drill bit and it took 5 days to shake off." Hope they don't break their bit! www.youtube.com/watch?app=de...

More student work from my undergrad data storytelling class🎉 They wrote data stories that centered map-based visuals. Datawrapper, StoryMaps, Tableau, Flourish. 🧵

Coming up on Friday, May 15! A new public Data Visualization for Public Health workshop. If you're an analyst, evaluator, researcher, or communicator who creates charts as part of your work, in 2.5 hours you'll learn how to build better charts (with hands on exercises). maven.com/communicatin...