“Starting small is how we hope to increase data literacy and further these conversations…But most importantly, this was a project where we put all of ourselves as human beings and designers into this radical experimentation: approaching the data we collected as snapshots of our days and lives…to discover with the most contemporary material, data.” ~ Giorgia Lupi, Stefanie Posavec, Dear Data Medium blog
Just last week, Kirstie Whitaker posted a lovely explanation on our blog of how to host a book club on Twitter, something we’ve already done twice @MozillaScience, and something we’ll again do in 2017. In December, we read Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil, and further discussed math ethics in our Community Call on fairness, accountability, and ethical open science practice. Our upcoming Community Call (February 16th) is themed around art/science projects, and last Wednesday, we crowdsourced suggestions for a complementary book club read with our community on Twitter.
The poll results are in, and for our book club in February (2/20/17, 12pm ET), we’ll be reading Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec! Just fourth on Wired Magazine’s list of 19 Ingenious Design Books to Inspire You in 2017, and the “most beautiful” featured in 2015’s Information is Beautiful Awards , the 300-page book and corresponding art project showcases the recto-verso postcard conversation between two designers over 52 weeks, and across an ocean.
Dear Data: side-by-side postcards for the “week of interesting things”
Each week, both authors/artists exchanged postcards themed around “personal documentary” data, collected and visualized via their postcard designs. Our aim in hosting the book club tweet chat is to discuss this post-card conversation in the larger context of sharing data and open art practice, and revisit some of the themes in our preceding art/science Community Call.
Dear Data: “To Draw is to Remember”
Learn more
We encourage you to invest in a copy, waitlist-it at the library, and page through the beautiful spreads to select your favorites. And we’d love for you to join us on February 20th, and contribute to our open quant-self / open data conversation.
Want to learn more about the book? Read the following pieces to study up before our tweet chat!
* The Dear Data project website
* Data Drawing Penpals: a review of the process by Flowing Data
* How do Twitter book clubs work? by Kirstie Whitaker
Join us!
When: Monday, February 20th, 9am PT/12pm ET/5pm UTC
What: Tweet Book Chat: Weapons of Math Destruction
Where: Twitter, @MozillaScience #mozreads
Have another book to share with the community? Fill out our book suggestion survey to submit a recommended read of your own: https://mzl.la/mozBookClub . Quick reminder that if your suggestion is excellent, we may send you a book!
Thank you for reading our blog! <3 the Mozilla Science Lab (images from our well-loved copy of Dear Data)