Kate McDowell on Storytelling

 Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians, early demo is available! This is more of a conceptual mapping than a completed product or project, in alignment with our two-year planning grant. But you can walk through a demo mockup here: https://uiucdstl.wixsite.com/uiucdstl This work is a product of a year of collaboration with the Core Design Team, a team of 40 volunteer librarians, library data experts, and researchers who have contributed their knowledge and experience throughout this first year of the project. Next year, we'll be refining the toolkit and offering larger public workshops for broad participation and feedback from the library community. Stay tuned!

 This fall, with Dr. Matt Turk and RA Xinhui Hu, we launched the Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians project ( https://imls.gov/grants/awarded/re-250094-ols-21 ) with a free webinar on 9/30 (recording publicly available at  https://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_69ag1gj0 ) and 675 registrants!  The Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians (DSTL project website:  https://uiucdstl.wixsite.com/uiucdstl ) will connect real-world examples of data use with data stories (including narrative strategies and data visualizations) as adaptable templates for communicating and related online free resources for data exploration and visualization. The long-term vision is to cultivating data storytelling expertise as a signature expertise of our field, so that when communities have data storytelling needs, they are met at libraries and by librarians. As of 11/15/22, we have collected 11 data use scenarios, which we're now calling "common storytelling needs." The goal is to de...

We have loads of theories about the production of misinformation that focus on those generating it (manipulators, liars, propagandists), but so little that centers the audience. Such an exploration would point us toward its voluntary rapid circulation and the collective behaviors of sharing. The closest thing we've got is storytelling in terms of how gossip and rumors blaze across communities, now and historically. But of course the spread of stories, true or false, is enabled by the internet and platforms for information sharing that amplify polarizing information. A key model for qualitative research in these areas is storytelling, but until recently storytelling has been more practice than theory in library and information science (LIS) and the information sciences (IS). So I'm working on theorizing storytelling as information for multiple reasons, and the rapid spread of misinformation is one of them. Another is that indigenous knowledge is routinely shut out of (settler co...

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.

I took a couple of weeks off, but I'm back with a new Saturday Story, this one all about a story I heard this week about what staying calm can do and how it can be a gift for others. The talk I mention can be found here: https://www.awakin.org/calls/470/parker-palmer-with-mary-pipher-and-michael-penn/

Here's this week's flawed, weird, but heartfelt video offering to my friends.

Digging Deep It's gardening time and covid-19 time, all at once. Today the winds are a constant whistle and howl here in the flat midwest, though yesterday it was warm and rainy. March is going out like a lion. This week, I came as I was. In the previous videos I had dressed up more or less as I would be for teaching. But, with so many home and emotionally exhausted, it felt more authentic to show up in my gardening clothes, clean faced, just to have a conversation. After all, this is for my friends as an audience, and they don't mind. Audience matters here. Though I've set these for public viewing in the thought that they might bring comfort to others, I mean this to be for those who have been friend enough to me to stay on Facebook. It's a wide swath of people from all across my life, family and childhood all the way to professional connections from this year. I had some requests to move the time for the West Coast folks, but in truth my energy is limited to...