Will Careri served Nightingale as Managing Editor between 2024 – 2026, after holding roles as a contributing writer and member of the core editorial team beginning in 2022. As a writer, he published two of the most-read articles on Nightingale in “Designing for Neurodivergent Audiences” and “The Visual Evolution of the Tommy Westphall Universe.” As Managing Editor, he worked with nearly 150 contributors to produce more than 200 articles. Additionally, throughout his time with the publication, he assisted in the development of three print issues of Nightingale—”Guidelines,” “Emotion,” and “Nature.”

While Will is stepping down from his day-to-day role of Managing Editor, he looks forward to continue being an active editor and contributor in new and similar capacities.

Teo Popescu is no stranger to Nightingale, serving as the Content Editor from 2024 – 2025, primarily responsible for bringing the print edition to life, particularly “Issue 5: Nature.”

Outside of her work with Nightingale, she is the design, graphics and data editor at KUOW Public Radio, Seattle’s local NPR station. Her work includes running KUOW’s Trump legal tracker for the first three months of the administration, visualizing ICE arrest data in Washington state, and contributing to a joint story with ProPublica on Seattle’s potential misuse of shelter funds. Additionally, she teaches multimedia and graphics journalism at UC Berkeley and the University of Washington.

While stepping into the Managing Editor role marks her return to Nightingale, she has spent the past year focusing on launching her new data journalism podcast, “Control F“, where her and her co-host dig deep on a topic and search through research, algorithms, and assumptions to bring listeners insights on how stuff works using data and visualizations.

I’m excited to come back to the Nightingale community. It’s an honor to come back in this way—to take up the mantle Will leaves behind. I’m excited to get to know everyone better and continue to foster a sense of community. I hope that with every article we publish, the love for our craft is evident on the page. It’s what keeps me coming back, and I hope it helps sustain you in these times, too. 

The post Teo Popescu Named New Managing Editor of Nightingale appeared first on Nightingale.

The Data Visualization Society (DVS) launched on February 20, 2019 with a post on Medium. It was a shock, a movement, a global phenomenon.

That article begins: 

“Over the last few years, data visualization has grown dramatically more common in our day-to-day experience. We see it in our news articles, in our social media and, for many of us, every day at work. The task of designing, creating, and deploying data visualization isn’t just a single profession but shows up in the work of engineers, analysts, salespeople, doctors, journalists, designers, students, and more… We created the Data Visualization Society in order to address that lack of professional development in the field, create a larger community, and provide a space that makes it more possible to learn from one another, differences and all. In doing so, we hope to establish guidelines for professional development to support people starting out in data visualization as well as those who have established careers.”

The DVS was started by Elijah Meeks, Amy Cesal, and Mollie Pettit months after a great conference called Tapestry held at the University of Miami in the fall of 2018. I was there because, earlier in 2018, I had written a series of lengthy articles about the data visualizations of W.E.B. Du Bois and had been chosen to give what was probably the first public presentation on his amazing work. I was so nervous that I read my talk word-for-word from a paper script because I was so worried that I’d mess up in front of a room of my new heroes.

On the first day, I met Elijah and he invited me to sit with him for lunch. In the next few minutes, the people who joined that table were a who’s who of dataviz—Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Mona Chalabi, Steve Wexler—I think Amanda Makulec was there too, or maybe she was at the next table. I was a big fan of RJ Andrews and he was at the next table. I was buzzing just to be near them all. I met Robert Crocker in the coffee line. Bill Shandler, too. Mollie Pettit had some kind of an amazing jacket and I told my wife how cool she was that night. Joey Cherderchuck showed off a demo that literally blew my mind the next day. I had no idea at the time, but many of the people at that conference turned out to have a major role in my life ever since. I had arrived into a scene somehow without even realizing it was a scene.

But a few months later, when Amy, Elijah, and Mollie made their announcement, I instantly joined. I think I was the seventh person to sign up for the DVS, and I pretty much blew off work to watch the DVS Slack grow by hundreds of people every few minutes. Something was happening and it was exhilarating!

Like I said, I had been writing a lot about dataviz and I was bummed about not having a good home to publish in. The main game in town at the time was Toward Data Science, and the data visualization subsection was a small, neglected back corner of their Medium empire. 

I was chatting with Elijah—it was my fourth or fifth message on the first day of the DVS Slack: “You know, if we do this thing right, we could make an amazing publication.” A few messages later I said, “if DVS grows, maybe we could do a print magazine one day!” That was the beginning of Nightingale. I knew from day one that we could make a community publication, and we would eventually make something physical. 

I became the Publications Director, and together with Elijah, we brokered a deal with Medium to create an exclusive publication which they paid for monthly. It felt clandestine.

On July 15, 2019, we launched Nightingale the Journal of the Data Visualization Society with four articles: 

Welcome To Nightingale by me, Jason Forrest, an introduction to the new publication.

Florence Nightingale is a Design Hero by RJ Andrews, which was the germ of an idea that evolved into his incredible book on Nightingale a few years later.

Beyond Nightingale: Being a Woman in Data Visualization by Stephanie Evergreen on tokenism in our community.

From the Battlefield to Basketball: A Data Visualization Journey with Florence Nightingale by Senthil Natarajan on creating a rose diagram for basketball stats.

Together, we felt these four articles represented a significant new direction for discourse in our community. These were not peer-reviewed papers, these were not articles playing second fiddle to hum-drum machine learning how-tos—these were serious explorations into divergent corners of dataviz that had never been explored. They were interesting, and they were alive!

My article started with this perky introduction:

“Nightingale will bring you high-quality articles each day covering many of the applications of data visualization — including education, entertainment, history, sports, best practices, new techniques, and any other form of visual information design we find compelling. We’ll host interviews with thought leaders and interesting people from the DVS community and beyond. Like all adventurers, we want to explore the unexplored, to look to the past and dream of the future. It’s exciting!”

So, here we are, six years later, and it’s worth noting that, as adventurers—we have done exactly this. We have explored so many new concepts that have never been written about in dataviz before. We created new ways to share our thoughts, spotlight new perspectives, share our work in progress, and reflect on our accomplishments and failures in an effort to help others. We held interviews, reviewed books and conferences, and created a global platform for our field to easily share their feelings and half-baked ideas. I am shocked at how thoroughly our mission at Nightingale has lived up to this initial statement and that of the DVS in general. We have created a living, active dialogue.

But establishing Nightingale in partnership with Medium also created two crucial mechanisms for our success: it allowed us to pay writers and hire staff to edit, illustrate, post, and promote each article, but it also provided critical start-up funding for the DVS. It can not be underscored enough how building this editorial team has helped our community! While no one has become rich from writing a Nightingale article (or being on our team) we can honestly say that everyone involved has been paid. By establishing an editorial team, we ensured that articles were systematically published at a sustainable rate to keep the conversation going. Consistency is so important for a professional publication, and we’re proud to have fought the good fight to keep Nightingale standards high, to keep everyone paid, and publish roughly two thousand articles.

Building an editorial team was the real joy

It started with our first managing editor, Isaac Levy-Rubinett, a sports journalist with an interest in dataviz. He helped us establish our first group of editors, created standards and processes to get articles edited, designed, posted, and promoted. Isaac was a gifted editor and created the theme week concept and much more. Our next managing editor was Mary Aviles, a design researcher and writer from Detroit who brought our publication to the next level in many ways. Mary got shit done but with grace and a deep consideration for our writers and community. 

On Feb 8, 2021, Mary and I co-published an article called “The Future Of Nightingale,” announcing the brazen goal of launching a print magazine. I honestly don’t think anyone really understood what that meant, but Mary and I were excited to give it a try. We pulled in our hot-shot editor Claire Santoro to be our new “Content Editor”—a role focused on creating and editing the best content for the new print magazine. Claire is a data analyst focused on sustainability and she crafted much of the vibe of Nightingale Magazine. Claire came up with a lot of our series content, like the popular Dataviz Horror Stories, etc.

I remember we had a few meetings with our editorial committee team where we asked questions like: “What even goes in a print magazine?” and “How do you ship them?,” but we figured it all out together. We also re-platformed from Medium to our own website (this one) and set up a CMS, which was a total pain, but it meant that all articles would be free and open to everyone.

This was right as the first Outlier was happening. It was still the pandemic, so it was online, and that’s where we first saw the amazing work of Julie Brunet (aka datacitron). It was a leap-before-look moment when I wrote her on Slack, and immediately said:  “Do you want to be our Creative Director?” She agreed and designed our brand and (almost) every page of our print magazines since! Some of my most exciting professional moments over the past six years were seeing her designs for the first time—and there are too many of those special moments to count!

Various images from the first five issues of Nightingale Magazine

We had published two issues of Nightingale magazine when our next Managing Editor, Emily Barone, joined us after being a data journalist and editor at Time Magazine. We were so excited because we were finally working with someone who had done this before! Emily brought so much care to her role in addition to her operational publishing expertise. She came up with the special sections in the back of each magazine, among many innovations, and helped us publish two more print magazines and another few hundred articles online. Emily also handled a bunch of the extremely difficult shipping logistics and set us on the right road for Issue 5 of the magazine.

Printed copies of Issue 5 at the printers. About 600 of these also took an international trip to EU that took more than three months—UGG!

I’m so proud of each member of our editorial team! Our current group—Will, Teo, Ale, and Julie—have already begun to take over my day-to-day responsibilities and will continue to provide the same level of care and enthusiasm for our writers and community as we have for the past six years. Honestly, there’s so much I can say about each of our editors (my friends) that I could go on and on. But I’ll wrap this up by saying that I truly learned so much from each one of you and I will forever be grateful for your collaboration!

My master plan—revealed!

Ok, I’ll admit it. For the last six years I had an agenda all along—to expand our community and influence it towards creating more illustrative, human-focused design. When I announced the magazine, I told people “it’s like a fashion magazine, but for dataviz”—and that was exactly the point. To make dataviz more alluring and to build on the magic of embodying data by showing our community the added power of illustration and design.

This is in service to attracting more attention to the data, to shining a light on new perspectives, and to propose a new way of communicating information to people. If you look at dataviz before Nightingale, and look at it today, I think you can see how we helped dataviz evolve our field in this direction. Sure, Nightingale hasn’t been the only publication pushing for this, but it’s easy to see how we championed creative, engaging ways to illustrate data and expand the scope of what is possible—and we have done this on a global scale.

In conclusion

So, here it is, the 1,444th article. Yes, it’s a bit bittersweet, but transitioning into my next phase as contributor, patron, and I hope, advertiser, means that I get to find new ways to engage with our community and support this amazing publication that has done far more for me than I can express. 

I thank my co-founder and friend, Elijah Meeks, for your collaboration over all these years. You always showed me so much respect from our first meeting to today, and I have learned much from your guidance and become wiser for (mostly) following it. 

I’d also like to warmly thank my friend and collaborator, Amanda Makulec, the former Executive Director of the DVS, who has been with me from the beginning of the DVS until now. We have a deep respect for each other and have supported each other through the ups and downs (yes, there have been a few of those), but we always remained focused on doing what was best for our community. I can’t wait to see where you go in your next chapter!

Lastly – I WANT TO THANK YOU!!! For the past six years, I have constantly engaged with our global dataviz community as an editor, on social, at conferences, answering your customer questions and complaints (yes, mistakes have been made!) and I remain still buzzing to just be part of it all. It’s like that moment back at the Tapestry Conference, when I was surrounded by all those famous dataviz people I had heard about—and that feeling just never stopped. In many ways, the community I feel a part of today is a reflection of the community I had always wanted to be part of—like a dream come true, a fantasy realized, a warm conversation with old friends. Thank you all for being so amazingly kind.

What’s next for me?

As most people know, I have a lot of energy and a lot of ideas!

I’m currently building the Jason Forrest Agency—a dataviz agency specializing in interactive projects in business. We’re small but growing fast, and I think we bring a different perspective on how to apply data storytelling concepts in a way that feels more relevant than ever.

I have also been hard at work on Data Vandals, a data activism project which is becoming increasingly more public. There’s so much more to explore by making dataviz more experiential and public. We’re excited that the idea is catching on! 

I also have a third “big thing” that is starting later this year. Unfortunately, I can’t announce it just yet, but my goal of advancing a more illustrative, human version of dataviz, and helping to open it up to the general public remains my focus—and it feels like the conversation will only get more dynamic from here.

Lastly, I look forward to writing more! I started Nightingale because I was a writer, but slowly this got pushed aside to deal with fun tasks like international shipping. I’ve also finished a book, so there will be so much more to write about, elaborate upon, and promote! 

So yes, I’ll be busy, and easy to find.

THANK YOU SO MUCH—IT’S BEEN AN HONOR!

Jason Forrest

The post My 6 Years at Nightingale: 1,443 Digital Articles, 5 Print Magazines, and a Whole Lot of Love appeared first on Nightingale.

There are many reasons why you’d want to sign up on Day One, but the most obvious is you want to support our community and you believe in our mission here at Nightingale! After all, we’ve published over 600 articles and introduced over 100 first-time writers. We’ve published on every aspect of dataviz that we can think of—and so many that we never would have thought of previously.

But today is also the first day of an ambitious effort to secure 1,000 subscribers by November 15th! Our goal has always been to make Nightingale a self-sustaining publication that will live on for many years and support subsequent generations of dataviz practitioners. If—WHEN—we reach our goal of 1,000 subscribers, we will have enough to build out our staff and ensure a foundation to sustain our digital and print formats. We know it’s possible, but we need your help!

Lastly, many folks have asked us about advertising, and yes, we will be offering advertisement space. Revenue from ad sales will help us pay everyone who works on the magazine as well as launch new mentorship programs for first-time publishers. We feature many advertising options and our prices have been configured to work for the smallest single-person companies up to the biggest corporations. Just get in touch and let’s have a conversation!

The post Print Subscription Starts Today! appeared first on Nightingale.

To keep things fun (always a goal at Nightingale!), we are going to introduce ourselves through the game Two Truths and a Lie. Which of these fun “facts” is not true for each editor? Read to the end to find out! Portraits were drawn by Yifan Luo.

Jason Forrest, Editor-in-Chief. Jason is a dataviz designer, father, and history obsessive.

1. I once had a machine gun brandished at me by the Russian military.
2. I have performed on six continents.
3. I own over a thousand dataviz books.

Mary Aviles, Managing Editor. Mary is a multi-sector human experience strategist, researcher, and sense maker. Check out her website and connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

1. I love to snowshoe in the woods and on frozen lakes.
2. Heidi Klum asked me for my opinion on her autobiography on a flight back from St. Maarten when I got upgraded to first class.
3. I have interviewed ALL kinds of people, including data security professionals from the FBI, the DOD, and the NSA.

Claire Santoro, Sections Editor. Claire is an environmental analyst and information designer with a passion for energy, sustainability, and the outdoors. Find her @ClaireESantoro on Twitter.

1. As a teenager I performed with a circus, tap dancing and juggling at the same time.
2. I have a pet lizard named Athena.
3. In 2018, I traveled to 13 countries while living in France.

Senthil Natarajan. Senthil is known for doing data things and Red Pants Fridays, but not necessarily in that order. Find him @SENTH1S on Twitter.

1. I’ve eaten sushi at the Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo.
2. I have a stuffed turtle that is autographed by members of the New Orleans Saints 2009 Super Bowl winning team.
3. I only own three pairs of shoes.

Noëlle Rakotondravony. Noëlle is a PhD student in computer science, doing research on the intersection of data visualization and human languages. Find her @curiouslemur on Twitter.

1. I speak eight languages and do translation as a side job.
2. I grew up on an island.
3. My very first D3.js graph ever was a pie chart and it took me three hours to get it done.

Alyssa Bell. Alyssa is a product manager in healthtech with a boundless enthusiasm for learning new (and often trivial) things.

1. I was a rugby player for over a decade.
2. I am one of six siblings.
3. Friends and I created 35 weeks of virtual quizzo during the pandemic.

Georges Hattab. Georges is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Marburg, Germany. His main focus is developing algorithms and software solutions using Data Analytics and Visualization to solve applied research problems in bioinformatics. Check out more of his work on his website.

1. I enjoy the algorithmic aspect behind origami. Seeing origami fold into wondrous shapes is both satisfactory and magical.
2. I am fond of physical records, e.g, vinyl, cassette tapes. Owning a musical record as a physical medium is an entirely different experience than clicking on a link or using an app. The intricacies of the storage medium become apparent and are taken into consideration.
3. I didn’t never hike more than 70 km in one day

So, did you guess which of the fun “facts” were actually lies? Here are the answers:

Jason: 3, Mary: 2, Claire: 2, Senthil: 3, Noëlle: 1, Alyssa: 2, Georges: None! All three of Georges’ facts were true… but he wanted to keep us on our editorial toes by throwing in a tricky double negative.

The post Meet the Nightingale Editors appeared first on Nightingale.

After announcing at Outlier that we were leaving Medium and that we were starting a print version of Nightingale, we put out a call for volunteers to get involved and received an overwhelming response. Since then, a core team of nearly 30 folks have dedicated countless lunches, evenings, and weekends across a range of time zones to launch the new site. Now we have three teams focused on editorial, design, and operations (check out our team page.) 

Yes, we are now FREE! Yes, all our articles on this site are free and open to anyone to read. There is no more paywall, and we will leave most of our old articles up on Medium as an archive. All DVS members have access to the Medium links on the DVS slack and we might just port over many articles to the new site per the desires of our writers (they have the last word).

While our push over the past few months has been mainly operational, we are also free to shift into a more design and editorial focus moving forward. Not only will we bring in a new creative director in Julie Brunet / Data Citron to help our brand evolve, but we also welcome Claire Santoro to help us organize sections and alternative content forms. In the next few weeks, you’ll begin to see how this evolution in the content will continue to diversify our discourse, extending into spotlights and more content for children and education.

Essentially, we’ve organized the site into three pillars: 

• Dataviz discourse and topical discussion
• Practical applications and how-tos
• Community spotlights that feature accomplishments like books, webinars, podcasts, exhibits, and cool projects

The new site also allows us added flexibility, which we’re embracing to introduce new short-form and image-rich content like Heather Jones’ cicada piece and fast takes like our 3 Questions With features. Stay tuned for all kinds of fun stuff like trivia, quizzes, horror stories, how it started/how it’s going, and more! And, if you have ideas for content you want to see, let us know!

Also – we are SUPER excited to introduce a new section: Kids Dataviz! Designed to showcase fun, creativity, and engagement, we kicked off this series last week with Julia Krolik’s article in collaboration with her son. This is a topic the editorial committee is extremely jazzed about and we see so many amazing opportunities to explore more! What about comics? Treasure hunts? Coloring books? We are building a dedicated team for this now, but we want you to get involved, so email us for details. 

There are many questions about Nightingale Magazine (that’s what we’re calling our print version) – and you can read more about our vision – but, we will be following up with more explicit details when we open up our subscription service in the coming weeks. We see this as an important opportunity to expand beyond our professional “bubble” and plan to launch our first issue later this year.

Finally, because Nightingale is free of the Medium paywall, we are also free to find and collaborate with Sponsors. Please consider helping us find sponsors willing to invest in the important work of sustaining this community resource. Our readership represents an extremely unique cross-section of people who care deeply about dataviz. Our community is enthusiastic and willing to dedicate significant time and attention engaging with high-quality content. As stewards of this audience, we are seeking like-minded sponsors who recognize this value. You can find a link to sponsorship opportunities front and center on our home page. 

We remain committed to providing a platform by and for the dataviz community. We want to hear your thoughts and ideas on how we might improve the new Nightingale. Did you find a bug? Can we improve our SEO? We are always looking to improve so please let us know.

Nightingale is indeed now FREE: free for everyone to read, free for our community to use as a platform for expression, free to evolve, and certainly free to enjoy and support.

PS: Our editorial process has changed slightly but please keep submitting articles! We pay all our writers and pair you with an editorial team committed to making sure your article is the best it can be. Get started by reading our editorial guidelines and then submitting your pitch/article materials to nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org. It works best if you send a link to a Google folder containing the article and the images. In the article, please note which image to place in which position. This is a change from our previous process of submitting through Medium. 

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