Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: On Voyant Tools, Stopword Lists, and Japanese Textual Analysis and Visualisation

Over the past year, I have been working on a textual analysis project exploring Japanese understandings of Judaism, Israel, and Zionism during the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō periods (1912-1926) as a part of a fellowship at Brandeis University’s Schusterman Center for Israel Studies, Institute for Advanced Israel Studies. In fact, I am writing this article […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: AI bots are destroying Open Access

There’s a war going on on the Internet. AI companies with billions to burn are hard at work destroying the websites of libraries, archives, non-profit organizations, and scholarly publishers, anyone who is working to make quality information universally available on the internet. And the technologists defending against this broad-based attack are doing everything they can […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Reconstructing Kalmyk Buddhist Monasteries through Digital Modeling

Simon Daisley is an independent researcher of Kalmyk Buddhism and a digital heritage practitioner based in New Zealand. Through a personal interest in Buddhism, particularly in the history of Buddhism in the Russian Empire and among the Kalmyk people, Daisley has been researching Kalmyk Buddhist monasteries (khuruls), especially those that were destroyed in the Soviet […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Noise in Creative Coding

Noise is an indispensable tool for creative coding. We use it to generate all kinds of organic effects like clouds, landscapes and contours. Or to move and distort objects with a more lifelike behaviour. On the surface, noise appears to be simple to use but, there are so many layers to it. This post takes […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Urban Patterns of Police Misconduct

Nightingale authors come from varied disciplines; I’ve seen articles by visualization scientists, sociologists, public health experts, applied ethicists, geographers, etc. This report and its accompanying infographics reflect a Venn diagram of many of those disciplines. The arrival of the trial of Mr. Derek Chauvin this month — in the city where I teach and write […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Behind every algorithm, there be politics.

In my first class in computer science, I was taught that an algorithm is simply a way of expressing formal rules given to a computer. Computers like rules. They follow them. Turns out that bureaucracy and legal systems like rules too. The big difference is that, in the world of computing, we call those who […]

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Introducing POLLEN!

CHANNELS CHANNELS EVERYWHERE When I joined the DVS in February of 2019, the amount of activity on DVS’s Slack was thrilling! I met incredible friends, shared various dataviz projects, learned A LOT and fanboyed/fangirled over some of my favourite data visualization practitioners. In fact, I got so inspired by our vibrant Slack community that I […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Text Analysis of Digitized “Lienü zhuan” with Voyant Tools

Voyant Tools is a popular website that offers a series of text analysis tools for examining word frequencies, patterns, and trends of a document. Although Voyant Tools supports analyzed documents in multiple languages, current tutorials and articles mainly focus on the application of Voyant Tools to English (Rockwell and Sinclair 2017). In this project, I […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Plant Humanities Lab

The Plant Humanities Lab is an innovative digital space that supports the interdisciplinary study of plants from the various perspectives of the arts, sciences, and humanities, to explore their extraordinary significance to human culture. Humans rely on plants for our most fundamental individual and social needs: from food, medicine, and construction to our encounters with […]