Slow Fear, a Saturday Story

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Today's Saturday story comes from my listening to many friends who are talking about not wanting to be afraid right now, and it features a postcard from The Courage Connection, an organization headed by my friend Elizabeth McGreal Cook who helps people survive domestic abuse.

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Plot and the correlation-causality continuum

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When I talk to people about plot or read books about how to write a great plot, for instance for a movie (1), folks generally assume that plot indicates causality. Events occur in an order, one causing another, as a straight line of dominoes each causing the next to topple. That bad old wolf wouldn't have eaten Grandma if Little Red Riding Hood hadn't strayed from the path, like her mother said, right?  But I don't think causality alone is what fascinates most of us about a good story. I argue that plot operates on a continuum between correlation and causation . This is a continuum that includes both ends. What I mean is that stories actually don't make clear and explicit arguments about causality all of the time. They do sometimes, when they are operating at the extreme causation end of the spectrum, but many times events occur in sequence without an argument about causation. Our minds are drawn to stories because the sequence of events in a typical plot is ...
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So ALA sent out their email to invite members to come to ALA Annual in Chicago this year, and they selected five sessions to highlight. Ours is one of them!   As the US struggles with an onslaught of book banning like we have not seen in my lifetime, our project, the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians , aims to get ahead of what we expect to come next: local battles over the existence of public and community college libraries. In fact, this battle has already begun, with some community college libraries in my state losing up to 2/3rds of their former staffing levels since the Covid-19 pandemic. We are right on time. This concern about defending libraries launched my research on understanding data storytelling in librarianship, with a pilot project in 2019 funded by the Center for Social & Behavioral Science at the University of Illinois--an article on obstacles to library data storytelling is in press with Public Library Quarterly, likely to be published in summer 2023. ...
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Book launch and talks in four months

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 As I wrote in Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries : " There is no greater indication that libraries have a role to play in a free society than the degree to which they are attacked by authoritarian leaders and pro-censorship groups." Among the indications that the ideas in the book are timely have been the number of invited talks during fall 2025, and the number that I'm having to turn down. I was able to accept thirteen (13) invitations from August to November. The largest attended one was the AISLE keynote for Illinois school librarians. The one that most fueled my own creative thoughts was United for Libraries, the ALA-based group focusing on how trustees and friends of the library can help, because I have great interest in how data storytelling for libraries can have real local influence through those best positioned to retell the stories. The furthest away one was in Denmark, where I was so fortunate to spend my sabbatical and was already traveling there for my...
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