Boston 2025 City Elections - The Scope
A polling site in a school gymnasium
🗣️📈 Today, I'm happy to release a new tool empowering chatbots like AnthropicAI's Claude to create charts with Datawrapper, a leading newsroom tool for publishing data.
Excited to have Sydney Purdue presenting the latest in our ongoing work on data theatre at the Input Visualization Workshop at
@ieeevis this week. We found early evidence showing the embodied methods worked to create data and build cohesion in summer workshops. Preprint at
https://osf.io/aeu5gSo who is thinking through what "abolish ICE" looks like after the fact? They are characterized by many as a poorly trained, heavily armed, zero-oversight paramilitary force driven by a racist ideology. 10,000 strong and growing. How do you reintegrate this population into society _after_ you defund, disband & disarm them?
Media Cloud data bite: the US right is talking a lot more about "abolish ice" as a narrative vs the left. These are older partisanship collections, but clearly the right isn't focused on imagining a post-ICE country. ICE was only _founded_ in 2003.
In my lifetime the early 2000s disbanding of the Iraqi army is a notorious example. The US disarmed and fired them with no plan for reintegration, and many ended up in Al Qaeda and Isis. Post WWII we had Marshall Plan. Or are those too much bigger than ICE to be relevant? Is FARC in Colombia a better analogy?
Latest updates to my local protest mapper tool: had to remove ACLED due to new data restrictions, but CCC data was updated 2 weeks ago. Use it to make embeddable maps of protests in your area so far this year. Considering a bubble-map option since so many protests are happening in the same place 🤔
https://dataculture.northeastern.edu/local-protest-map/@kristin what's the status of datavis.social? I was going to migrate there as suggested but my application has been pending for a while. Thanks for review when you have time.
Big news in creative computing last week: Qualcomm is acquiring Arduino!
https://www.theverge.com/news/794452/qualcomm-arduino-acquisition-uno-q
Qualcomm is acquiring DIY electronics platform Arduino
Qualcomm is acquiring the DIY electronics platform Arduino, and launching a new Uno Q that connects to a new App Lab platform.
Excited this week to be co-hosting a field building symposium on "New(s) Knowledge". Gathering researchers, civic technologists, funders, community-based organizations, journalists, and others working to understand and strengthen information ecosystems. Should be brain-filling!
Ben Welsh