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In order to publish your article on Nightingale, you need to evaluate your article on each of the following six questions before you submit it to our editorial team.

1. What is the unique topic of your article?

Nightingale is the journal of the Data Visualization Society (DVS). We are interested in stories about all aspects of data visualization and information design for any industry, discipline, or mindset! We have an expansive view of what data visualization encompasses and how we use it in our world.

Picking something to write about is important and you should try not to cover something that has been covered too much. We ask that all authors be familiar with what we normally publish at Nightingale and at least generally scan for other articles on the same subject matter.

For example, there are many, many articles talking about why pie charts are bad. We do not need to publish another article rehashing the same information. That said, maybe you have a unique angle to contribute to this heated subject. If so, we welcome your article and thoughts, but your writing should acknowledge your familiarity with the subject, and why your article is advancing the discussion.

At the same time, not every article has to be 100 percent unique. We welcome personal stories, testimonials, and how-to articles. We have featured articles covering many aspects of dataviz — including education, entertainment, history, sports, best practices, new techniques, personal stories, testimonials, and other compelling aspects or implementations of visual information design. On the whole, our content tends to lean away from pure data science and toward data visualization and information design.

If there’s ever any question about what subject has been covered too much, just email or Slack us! We’ll let you know if we’ve already covered it.

2. What point are you making in your article?

Think big or think small. We want to help you communicate your big ideas, but we’re also interested in your hyper-granular, laser-focused articles, too. Regardless of the topic, you need to have a point and stick to it.

Before you write, you may want to sketch out the story format of your article. This will help you hone in on your main ideas, structure your work, see connections, and frame the point you’re trying to make. If you are using subsections, you should be able to summarize each in one sentence and so should the reader.

Taking time to consider the point you’re trying to make is more than finding the themes or facts in the structure of your article — doing this will help you focus on the “so what.” Being explicit with your readers helps them understand why your ideas matter to them. After all, this is a platform for discussion.

3. What is your article’s beginning, middle, and end?

After you know what to write about, you should consider how you’re going to write about it.

Nightingale’s readers range from students and seasoned practitioners to those adjacent to or interested in the field. We strive for a tone that is accessible and fun, but professional.

It is important to tell a story. All articles should have a beginning, middle, and end. This doesn’t mean that you need to bend over backward to write a novel when you are sharing a how-to — but you should try to introduce and contextualize it and provide a summation. This is how we think about stories and this format is proven to be effective.

Also, telling a story is more fun — for you and your readers. Readers like to follow along with you on your journey. We love stories about people, about life. Tell us about your mistakes, what made you proud, or what you’d do differently if you did it again. Even the most technical article can be made more relatable by bonding over shared experiences.

4. Is your article interesting, inspiring, or informative so that people will want to share it?

You should write and prepare your article so that people will want to share it with others. Putting a focus on sharing articles can help your ideas spread throughout the community. This is more important than just social media metrics. You should consider issues that people are curious about in our community so that you can add your voice to the conversation and make room for them to share theirs.

5. Does your article have interesting images?

Please consider images to be an integral part of your story. Everyone loves images — and data visualization is primarily visual — so include some examples!

Always include a high-resolution image at the top of your story. This has the following benefits:

• When people share your story on Facebook and Twitter, it will be more prominent in news feeds, making people more likely to click on it.
• Our readers prefer images of data visualizations.
• If you’re having a hard time, you can always look at the free-image services like Pixabay, Pexels, or Unsplash or discuss it with your editor.

Keep in mind that our readers are global and reflect all walks of life. Please think about this when making image choices.

Also, please caption every image or provide alt-text to aid with accessibility. Please consult these tips for writing alt-text.

6. Be cool to everyone

We don’t expect this to ever be an issue, but be sure to use an open-minded tone in your writing. We live in an age where words and representation really matter. We certainly want you to tell your story in your voice, but we also reserve the right to ask you to broaden your perspective.

We read all articles before publishing and try to help each one succeed by providing editorial support. You need to proofread your article several times before submitting it, but you should also expect that we will suggest some edits to your work before publishing. Our editors try to spark a friendly dialogue in order to take your piece to the next level.

“Be cool to everyone” is an easy mantra to keep in mind and ultimately it will help more people to engage with your ideas and share them with others.

Why do standards matter?

A standards-based approach will help us all to lift our voices and continue our high-energy discourse. We are thrilled to help our community share its ideas and passions. Please let us know what you think about our new process!

Submissions that do not clearly fit our standards above will be returned for further review before we can consider publishing.

We have always been enthusiastic about supporting new voices and over a third of our articles in 2020 came from first-time writers. In order to continue this support, we will establish new ways to pitch and review articles via a “sandbox” approach to support the development of emerging writers and provide proper mentorship. Our editorial staff will recommend authors for this program as it becomes available.

The checklist below will be the criteria that we review before accepting your article for the editing and publishing process:

Nightingale Magazine aims to be a collective community celebration, which means we encourage all members of the data visualization community – regardless of technical background, level of expertise, or any other defining characteristic – to submit articles for consideration. 

Please follow the guidelines below to submit. We look forward to seeing your submissions!

Print Submission Guidelines

Email submissions to nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org and note in your email that you are submitting for consideration in print.

Submission checklist

Ensure that your submission includes:

• A Google Doc with your article draft
• A Google Drive folder with accompanying images FOR WHICH YOU HAVE COPYRIGHT/PERMISSION TO PRINT (300 dpi preferred; lower resolution images may not render well enough to be printed). The ONLY case in which you do not need explicit permission to publish images that are not yours is if you are including an image of a book cover, film poster, etc., in a review.
• Note: all graphics and visualizations should align with our print guidelines, as detailed in this document [PDF]:

Process

• Each print issue announces the editorial theme and submission deadline for the upcoming issue. It is okay for articles not to have an explicit focus on the theme, but we will prioritize selecting pieces that fit with the theme in some way.
• Submission does not guarantee inclusion in the print magazine, though we will try to publish all submitted articles that meet our editorial standards either in print or online.
• Earlier submissions leave more time for editorial support. If you want input from our editors on the structure of your article or suspect that you will need help cleaning up your writing, aim to submit well before the deadline.
• The editorial team may need to edit aspects of your article (including changing the title, cutting text, or cutting or cropping images) to fit the layout and structure of the magazine. The team will do our best to make these changes collaboratively with you, but it is not feasible for us to offer authors the opportunity to review their fully-designed, print-ready pieces.

Types of PRINT content to submit

We encourage submissions of all kinds, even if it’s not listed here, but here are the types of content we are currently thinking of including:

• Columns, e.g., short, text-based articles that provide perspective on a particular topic like data literacy, data ethics, career tips, etc. (200 – 600 words)
• Short articles, e.g., “spotlight” or “gallery” pieces that focus on a specific visualization or collection of visualizations with short accompanying text. (200 – 600 words)
• Long articles, e.g., behind the scenes, interviews, research-based articles, etc. that go in depth on a particular topic. (1,200 – 2,500 words)
• Reviews of a book, event, course, conference, film, exhibit, etc. (200 words)
• Activities, e.g., crossword puzzles, trivia, Kids’ Table prompts, etc.

Columns

Columns are mostly text-based and need not include images. These pieces provide perspective on a particular topic such as data literacy, data ethics, career tips, etc.

• Word count: 200-600 words
• Images: Optional

Short articles

Short articles typically include only a short amount of text and instead focus on highlighting one particular visualization (a “spotlight”) or a collection of related visualizations (a “gallery”).

• Word count: 200-600 words
• Images:
  • For a spotlight piece, 1-3 visualizations designed to fit on a US letter size page (8.5 x 11 inches) or two-page spread.
  • For a gallery piece, up to 10 images from which the editorial team will select several to feature.

Long articles

Long articles include behind-the-scenes pieces, interviews, research-based articles, etc., that go in depth on a particular topic and include several supporting images.

• Word count: 1,200-2,500 words
• Images: It depends, but a good guideline is one image per every 600 words (or approximately 2-4 images per article)

Reviews

Reviews include a short amount of text describing your perspective on a book, event, course, conference, film, exhibit, etc., and one accompanying image.

• Word count: 200 words
• Images: One image representing what you are reviewing (e.g., book cover, film poster, course logo, etc.)

Activities

Get creative! Can you create a crossword puzzle or trivia quiz? Can you share dataviz activities you have done with your kids for The Kids’ Table? The content and format is up to you.

Digital Submission Guidelines

Email submissions to nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org.

Submission criteria

You must be a member of the Data Visualization Society to submit an article for publication. It’s free to join and you can sign up here.

Nightingale pieces should, in general, be original to Nightingale. Sometimes we get submissions/pitches for content that originally appeared on a personal Medium, website, or blog, but we prefer to originate content in Nightingale.

We prefer all articles to appear on Nightingale exclusively for three weeks before authors repost on their personal sites. After that, we encourage authors to link back to the original Nightingale post, the benefits of which include a credibility boost and SEO-friendly external links. If you have any questions, just send us an email — we’ll work it out!

Our content varies in length. Typically, we publish pieces between 500–3,000 words.

Submission process

To submit an article for consideration, after you’ve thoroughly reviewed these guidelines and the checklist above, please follow these steps:

1. Please email nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org with a link to your article in Google Docs and a Drive folder with associated images.
2. You will be assigned an editor within a few days of submitting your article. At that time, please send along a photo and a 2-3 sentence bio for your “author profile”; please also provide your social media handles (Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack) if you would like us to tag you in posts promoting your article.
3. The editorial workflow will occur in Google Docs using in-line revisions. After one or two reviews of the article, we’re usually ready to publish.
4. Once you and the editor agree on a final version, the editor will port the article into our WordPress site for your review.
5. The managing editor will schedule your article for publication. Articles are scheduled in the order they complete the editing process.

We publish new articles in the mornings (US east coast time) and promote them via the #dvs-nightingale-free Slack channel, Twitter, LinkedIn, and The ‘Gale (our newsletter).

Translations

We invite you to translate your article into other languages you speak. We are happy to publish articles in multiple languages and may be able to provide editorial support for other languages.

Nouvelles Normes Editoriales de Nightingale (French)

Compensation

Since our launch in July 2019, we’ve been able to pay everyone (writers, editors, and illustrators) for their brilliant work. The Data Visualization Society pays all Nightingale contributors directly. 

You have one of the following three options:

• Payment of $50 USD via bill.com.
• One free copy of the magazine, via a discount code that can be redeemed in our online shop (shipping charges may apply depending on your shipping address).
• Donate your payment back to the Data Visualization Society if you don’t wish to or are unable to accept compensation. We really do appreciate it – and YOU!

For more information, see our terms and conditions.

The rest of this article contains detailed answers to common questions our editorial team receives from writers. For any question at all, please write: nightingale@datavisualizationsociety.org.

What can I anticipate from the editorial process?

Our editorial staff adheres to the following style guidelines when reviewing your submission, so keep these guidelines in mind.

Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)

As Nightingale is a professional journal, we adhere to the CMOS, with some exceptions. Please familiarize yourself with this style before submitting. Note that our editorial staff will make minor CMOS-type edits directly to your article without explicitly flagging it for you.

Titles/headlines and subtitles

Headlines play an important role in getting people to read an article. All articles should have a main headline and then a subtitle that works in tandem to (a) show what the article is about and (b) attract readers.

All headlines should be in the title case. Use this tool to help.

Don’t use clickbait. Don’t use listicles. If your headline is too long, Google will truncate it. Long headlines can also prevent your top image from appearing in news feeds. Here are some tips from Medium about good headlines, and there is a Headline Analyzer tool within WordPress that you may use.

Eight principles for a great headline (from Medium):

1. Be direct
2. Use conversational language
3. Focus on what is most interesting
4. Be bold in your assertions
5. Check your bias
6. Communicate urgency
7. Show what someone will learn
8. Deliver on your promises

Other tips:

• Generally, statements are better than questions. That’s not a hard-and-fast rule, though.
• Particularly relevant for us, try to avoid dataviz jargon that the average reader might not understand.

Subheads and other formatting

Be judicious with bold text. Write your piece for easy readability so you don’t need to depend so heavily on bold text.

Please be consistent in your use of subheads in terms of both size and phrasing. If you start with a few words in your subheads, e.g., The data, continue with short phrases throughout your article. Don’t switch to full sentences later in the article. Also, please capitalize the first word of the subhead only. And capitalize the first word of the subtitle only, to further distinguish it from the headline.

Images and attribution

Please caption every image. Technically, as a writer, you are liable for copyright infringement. The simplest way to attribute an image is to put the words “Image credit” below an image and link this text to its original source.

Attribute quotes to the people who originally said them. If it’s a multi-line quote, you should use pull quote formatting:

“When you have wit of your own, it’s a pleasure to credit other people for theirs.”

Criss Jami

Resist the temptation to use pull quotes to quote your own story, or to tease something you’re about to say anyway.

Always give credit where credit is due to colleagues or other DVS members for their ideas. It is important to realize that some members may not want their names or direct quotes to appear in an article or even online. So make sure to reach out before quoting them or naming them to obtain their permission. If not, then paraphrase their ideas and make sure it is clear that the ideas are not your own.

Organizing and reviewing your content

Consider Dr. Bernadine Healy’s mantra: “strong verbs, short sentences” when writing. Review your content for run-on sentences and sentence fragments. Err on the side of breaking long sentences and paragraphs down into shorter ones. Consider separating sentences with semicolons into stand-alone statements. A paragraph is comprised of at least three sentences, but use frequent paragraph breaks, if necessary, to differentiate your article’s points. Make sure to introduce and/or explain graphs and other figures.

Keep your tense consistent throughout. If you’re talking about something that occurred in the past, use the past tense.

Evaluate the tone of your piece to ensure that your authentic voice comes through. Be aware of a tone that’s robotic or academic. Remember, this is meant to be a conversation with your reader.

Refer to your reader as “you” — not “we” or “us.” “We” are not going to do this tutorial, your reader is going to read your tutorial and do it on their own.

Code

Where possible, code should be in text form rather than images. This makes the code more accessible to screen readers, and easier for people to copy and paste.

Links

Some authors prefer to provide source links at the end of the article. Others use links in their main content. We accept either approach. However, if you are linking, try to work links into your sentence. Underlining text makes it harder to read, so only hyperlink a few words (no more than four).

If a link is vital to a story, you can create an embedded link by putting it on its own line and pressing enter.

Punctuation

Again, first please follow CMOS. Here are some quick tips:

• Put commas and periods inside quotes, except when it might confuse a reader (like with variable names or book titles).
• Use contractions. They’ll make your prose seem more conversational. That’s always a plus.
• Replace ampersands (&) with the full word “and.”

Titles within the article

Book titles, albums, TV shows, and movies should be in italics. Song titles should appear in quotation marks, e.g., “Data Visualization Rocks” is the first song on the upcoming album entitled I Love Data.

Numerals

Spell out one through nine: the Yankees finished second. He had nine months to go.

Use figures for 10 or above and whenever preceding a unit of measure or referring to ages of people, animals, events, or things — also in all tabular matter and in statistical and sequential forms.

Terminology

Authors can use British Data Visualisation or American Data Visualization. The shortened version is “datavis” or “dataviz” uncapitalized. Please treat dataset as one word.

Wow, you made it all the way down here? You are dedicated and deserve to treat yourself! Go have some fun before you submit your article. Haha.

The post How to Write for Nightingale 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. 

The post NIGHTINGALE IS FREE! appeared first on Nightingale.

I want to share my story of 2019 so that anyone can see what is possible with some planning and a bit of luck. Often simply beginning is the hardest aspect of doing anything, and giving yourself the freedom to experiment and get things wrong is equally important. But in order to tell you who I am now, I need to tell you who I was a year ago.

My Story (Or How I Went From Being Relatively Famous to Missing Something in My Life)

Looking back at the last year, I’m struck by how far I have come not only as a writer but also as a person in search of a passion.

Here’s my story:

What many in the dataviz community may not know is that I am a very well-known figure in a small but global electronic music scene. Just before the turn of the last decade, and shortly after the birth of my son, I decided to move into the next chapter of my career. Much to everyone’s surprise, I had literally accomplished all my dreams as a musician and it was time to move on.

Over the span of a few years, I stopped being a professional musician and moved into iOS development, and then co-founded a start-up for online video called Network Awesome. Going into Network Awesome, I knew that there could only be two outcomes: (1) that my company would work and I could do that as a job, or (2) I would gain the skills to “get a real job.” After a few years, Network Awesome was almost successful (i.e., not) and after a painful job search, I found myself working as a UX Designer. It was a job that I liked a lot, and it taught me how to use a system and leverage a process to make something with a purpose. But despite how interesting it was, it was ultimately just a job — not an identity like I had as a musician.

Not having a purpose (or a passion) was extremely difficult for me. I had gone from being a person that others sought out to just a guy with a job. Certainly happy in my life, but missing that certain spark.

In 2017, after working in UX Design for eight years, I started to go back and re-explore the foundations of design that I first learned in art school. I had always been interested in typography, so I spent a few months learning and experimenting. Shortly thereafter, I chose to move into data visualization as a way to marry my design interests with my technical and UX process knowledge. It all seemed related and I guess I wasn’t wrong.

One day I found a book of rare typographic specimens and diagrams called A2Z+ and that’s where I stumbled across some charts created in the year 1900 by the African-American political activist W.E.B. Du Bois. There wasn’t much information in the book, so I hit Google and started to look around. I was shocked. My initial search showed no substantial writing on his work. I found myself digging further and further into research. Despite feeling so massively unqualified to write about his landmark series of charts, I published my first article on his charts in July 2018. That piece is my most-read article to date and eventually led to a presentation at the Tapestry Conference in November of that year.

(Re)Finding My Passion: January 2019

So here I was. On January 1, 2019, I had just published the last article in my research on W.E.B. Du Bois’s data visualizations. It was meant to be a big gesture, as it made public the discovery of a previously unknown chart from Du Bois that I found in my research. I was so proud of this work and pleased to finish this project, yet drained by the effort. Despite being the pinnacle of my research, it remains one of my least read articles.

My research on Du Bois was an exhilarating project that had helped me tear down preconceived notions and force myself to examine the world from a new perspective. Exploring the charts and trying to understand their 19th-century context revealed a vast archive of fascinating and complex stories just waiting to be explored. Every time I opened a link, it seemed to reveal 10 more images, names, and events that caught my curiosity. I found more and more historic charts by more people that remain under-researched (at least digitally).

The clever reader will notice that even as I have told my story above, I went from describing my career to describing my new interests. Tapping into the rich world of history and data visualization literally opened new worlds for me. Without realizing it, I had found a new passion.

2019: The Year I Would Write My Ass Off

After spending so much time in the world of Du Bois, I set a challenge for myself to write two articles a month for 2019. I had so much to explore, and, early in 2019, I set off to fulfill my agenda. I dutifully wrote about the spiritualist painter Hilma af Klint, the master of the pictorial map Ernest Dudley Chase, and photographer Garry Winogrand, as well as the first in what I had planned as a series about data visualization in music.

Then in March, Elijah Meeks, Amy Cesal, and Mollie Pettit started the Data Visualization Society (DVS). The amazing people I met at the Tapestry Conference and the thousands more who joined the DVS had suddenly become my new peer group. I had kept it in mind to publish two articles a month until about March — right when the DVS launched — then promptly forgot about it. By that point, I had already been writing several nights a week and with the launching of the DVS, I also now had a new platform to publish my writing.

Without realizing it, I had created a habit of writing about subjects and people that I found super interesting. The boundless energy that people commented on before in my music career suddenly was back. As a result, in 2019 I wrote 25 major articles and collaborated on three additional feature-length interviews.

Looking back, I can’t believe how far I have come as a writer and as a person. My interest in historic data visualization is actually just an angle to explore human creativity in design. Each chart is a story with an objective, and exploring their context reveals a layer of nuance that takes research to understand. Looking at the past provides new insights into the present. My joy is to share what I find with others.

Finding a Place in the Community

As the DVS grew, so did its organization and I found myself taking over as editor-in-chief of its Medium publication in June.

After collaborating with Elijah Meeks and the DVS board of directors, we launched Nightingale as a Medium Partner Publication in mid-July. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not sure if I fully grasp the significance of Nightingale in my life and in our community yet, but it has given me a mission and blessed me with a team to see it through.

It has also given me new goals and dreams. The best thing about running a magazine is I now have a platform to meet the people that I admire and in 2019 I’ve been so excited to get the opportunity to meet Giorgia Lupi, Nadieh Bremer, Catherine D’Ignazio, Michelle Rial, and Nicholas Rougeux, to name just a few.

It’s been an incredible year. Our editorial staff at Nightingale and I have had the great fortune to coach and support 29 first-time writers this year and publish a total of 125 articles since July 10. Sure, it’s been a ton of work, but at the same time, it’s super interesting and very gratifying to help others by participating in the discourse that fuels community.

So I was very surprised and deeply gratified, to hear one of the most prominent figures in the Data Visualization Community, Alberto Cairo, list Nightingale as one of his 2019 highlights in the widely regarded Data Stories Podcast this month. He says:

“The quality level in general, is, on average, quite great. I think that it really contributes to the democratization of data visualization, which as you know is one of the main aims of my career. Which is precisely to make data visualization more visible and more accepted, and more widely adopted by the general public.”

He starts at 4:47 if you want to jump ahead: 152 | Year in Review 2019 | Data Stories on ACast

My Brain Works Better

There are so many benefits to writing that I’d be remiss if I didn’t list a few points in closing. After writing 28 articles and editing probably 50 more, I can honestly say that:

1. I am a much faster writer now.
2. Editing all those Nightingale articles helps me improve my own writing each day.
3. I can map out my thoughts more clearly.
4. My passion for learning has an outlet that I can share with others.
5. There are still so many new things to learn, so many new ideas to discuss, so many more people to meet, so and much more to write about.
6. Just as in my music career, my dreams are getting bigger.

My Biggest Lesson of 2019: Just Do It

Somewhere along my journey this year, I heard someone casually drop one of those phrases that you end up mulling over for months afterward. I’m sorry to say I don’t know who said it anymore, or even what the actual quote is, but it went something like:

“In order to be a part of a community, one has to participate in a community.”

It’s a statement that I now realize was the missing piece of what I was looking for all along. It was one thing to find a passion, and another to be part of a community, but it was really my participation in the DVS and the dataviz community at large that really completed who I was and gave me back the self-worth that I had been missing after my career as a musician.

This is a powerful life lesson. One that really only comes in moments of retrospection like this, at the beginning of a new decade and a new life.

What’s Up for 2020?

Becoming an active writer helped me so much in 2019. By (unconsciously) accomplishing my goals last year, I reset my focus for the coming one. Yes, Nightingale will continue to grow, and we have some ambitious plans in the works already, but I plan to focus on fewer subjects in order to help push them beyond our immediate community.

I have found that I am happiest when I am learning and immediately putting that into practice. I am thankful to learn so much from so many of you this year. But it’s time to keep going! To push on into places that I’m not comfortable with, to explore new ideas, and to continue to make friends and grow as a writer, designer, and person. That’s why we participate in a community — to expand discourse, challenge what is possible, and lean on each other for support.

But more than anything — I think it’s gonna be a lot of fun!

Here’s a list of all the articles I wrote in 2019 by date. I’m not sure if there’s any real pattern that emerges, but I do see a fire burning: https://medium.com/nightingale/how-i-became-myself-again-what-writing-did-for-my-self-worth-in-2019-1ed69286686

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