The Linchpen

SRCCON 2016 proposals: building a data community and embracing the arts

Since I’ll be in the country this time around, I’m hoping to attend my first SRCCON this summer in Portland. Here’s a brief description from the organizers, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews:

SRCCON is a hands-on conference focused on the practical challenges news technology and data teams encounter every day. We work to make it an inclusive and welcoming event where people can feel comfortable digging into complex problems.

Here are the pitches:

Continue reading SRCCON 2016 proposals: building a data community and embracing the arts

Video and updates from ONA15 session: Whose Idea of the Future Is This?

Inspired by Afrofuturism and other underrepresented perspectives, I organized a session at this year’s Online News Association 2015 conference in Los Angeles with an awesome group of speakers:

We’ve assembled a group of experts on futurism to look at predictions and possibilities for how our society is changing, and help rethink our approach to media, technology and our communities.

Here’s the session page. Here’s the Storify:

Continue reading Video and updates from ONA15 session: Whose Idea of the Future Is This?

Job news: I’m joining McClatchy DC as a data developer

After nearly five years at The Washington Post, I’m thrilled to start a new job in late September focused on data stories, projects and tools at McClatchy’s DC bureau.

I’ve loved working in the Post newsroom with such fantastic, inspiring coworkers. From starting on health/science and then world/national security production to building news apps/tools and managing local data projects to now producing on Team Rainbow, it’s been an invaluable and rewarding experience.

At McClatchy, this new role offers an unique opportunity to collaborate with their formidable DC bureau and across their 29 news organizations, plus sit near former Post colleagues who are part of an impressive video team. It’s also a chance to work again with my hometown paper The Miami Herald, where I freelanced and interned during college. I can’t wait to join all the talented journalists at McClatchy.

Here’s the very kind announcement from my new boss, Julie Moos:

All,

I’m excited to announce that Greg Linch will be joining us late this month to help plan, produce and launch data-driven projects coming out of our local newsrooms and out of DC.

Greg’s arrival enables us to broaden and deepen our data efforts, which you’ll be hearing more about in coming weeks. To start, we plan to provide do-it-yourself tools and a range of support for the data storytelling that’s becoming so essential to readers everywhere across a range of subjects.

Greg joins us from The Washington Post, where he currently works on Project Rainbow (the tablet team); his previous roles there include local data editor, news apps producer and national security producer. He has FOIAed and negotiated with local agencies to publish their daily crime data or weekly crime reports; led work on voter’s guides and results pages for primary and general elections; developed systems for handling documents (like the Clinton emails) and email newsletters; and worked on many projects that required reporting skills as strong as his coding skills.

Greg is a member of the board of directors of the Online News Association, co-organizer of the DC Hacks/Hackers chapter and an all-around great journalist capable of elevating our work in interesting ways. Here’s his resume.

Greg will be based at Tish’s old desk, as he fills the position opened by her departure. His professional career started at The Miami Herald and we are happy to lure him back to McClatchy, starting Sept. 29.

Thanks for joining me in making him feel welcome.

Julie

The interface as mediator

Umberto Roncoroni:

The interface is a mediation between the desire and the imagination of the user and all the tools one might need and the actual functions of the software, which are limited.

— Digital Art and Aesthetics: Studies and criticism from Latin America

The above is my translation. Here’s the original Spanish (let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement):

La interfaz es una mediación entre el deseo y la imaginación del usuario y todas las herramientas que se podrían al respecto necesitar y las funciones reales de software, que son limitadas.

— Arte y Estética Digital: Estudios y críticas desde Latinoamérica

Johanna Drucker on data vs. capta

Johanna Drucker in Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display:

Capta is “taken” actively while data is assumed to be a “given” able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.

Also, in her paper on Graphesis: Visual knowledge production and representation:

Data are considered objective “information” while capta is information that is captured because it conforms to the rules and hypothesis set for the experiment.

Hat tip to Mark Hansen when he mentioned the former at #NICAR14. And hat tip to Tim Carmody for first introducing me to Drucker when he recommended The Visible Word.