Nightingale: Our First Year
It’s honestly hard to believe that it has been only a year since I announced the founding of Nightingale. As the editor-in-chief, it’s been an exhilarating journey of friendships, meetings, late-night editing, and the daily joy of sharing articles (and voices) that we all care deeply about. Here, on our first birthday, I thought I’d take a few moments to share some reflections and thank-yous. I’ll try not to get too philosophical.
While it’s thrilling to consider what we have done, we also need to take stock of how different the world we live in today is. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to shape global societies in ways that we are still struggling to understand. Like everything, Nightingale has its own set of pandemic-related challenges and opportunities, so it’s difficult to really imagine what our next year will look like when our present is so chaotically uncertain. That said, let’s take a look back on the last year.
A dream made real
It all started when I took my dream of starting a dataviz-focused publication to Elijah Meeks shortly after he co-founded the Data Visualization Society (DVS) with Amy Cesal and Mollie Pettit. Being a very popular writer himself, Elijah said a journal was already on the top of his mind.
A year ago, there were not as many places to publish articles specifically about dataviz-related issues outside of academic journals or product/tech forums. The Medium landscape was focused mainly on data science, and both Elijah and I posted our articles in that community (he was the big fish, myself a minnow) but we both knew it wasn’t the right fit.
Elijah and I presented the newly formed Data Visualization Society (DVS) to Medium, and our resulting partnership helps us to compensate all our writers, illustrators, and editors while amplifying our work. This partnership allowed us to create our publication’s infrastructure as well as fund the first year of the DVS itself. After a check-in with our members this past winter, we continued our partnership with Medium and continue to look forward to new opportunities.
The first step in delivering on our goals
Nightingale launched with a few goals: to support our members regardless of their tenure, to nurture new voices, and to expand the discourse of information design and data visualization.
While we had ideas about the form this would take, we didn’t really know what would happen. In the past year, we have featured articles by luminaries in our field, hosted interviews with great minds, and introduced many first-time writers to our community.
Since July 15, 2019, we are been proud to have published 340 articles by 189 authors. This work has spanned a staggering array of themes from how-tos, ethical discussions, historical explorations, interviews, and comics. These articles range in subject from board games and environmentalism to Dutch pop music and Sportsviz by way of chart taxonomies, D3, data physicalization, plotters, and visual symphonies. Today, one of our writers, Alexandra Khoo, also helps celebrate our anniversary by exploring those goals further in her one-year retrospective article.
Our editorial team is just one of our strengths
What our readers may not really understand is how much work it takes to run a journal like Nightingale. Early in the process, we understood that we would need a team to help edit the large numbers of submissions, so we hired a Managing Editor and assembled a team of paid and volunteer editors.
Our editorial team started in September last year and has been the foundation that helps our writers present the best version of their work. Our managing editor, Isaac Levy-Rubinett, has done a remarkable job not only in managing the day-to-day operations but finding and welcoming an array of writers and illustrators. In addition to curating our Earth Week coverage, he keeps up with all the details that need to be done and usually thinks about the 10 things that are next. Our line editors, Mara Averick, Clare Harvey, Georges Hattab, Allen Hillery, Noëlle Rakotondravony, Alyssa Bell, and Senthil Natarajan each bring a warmth to their work, and it’s actually their spirit that makes Nightingale what it is today.
Expanding the impact of our voices
To say I’m proud of “our work” belies the importance of what we have created together — as a community. Nightingale is not just a community of people, but rather a community of thought. As our work extends beyond the DVS our individual articles and collective voices spread ideas. Nightingale articles have been featured in Fast Company, The Guardian, and the Tableau blog in addition to countless social media posts and conversations.
Indeed, what an honor to also help enrich the legacy of our namesake during the recognition of Florence Nightingale’s 200th birthday. RJ Andrew’s article was widely shared and Stephanie Evergreen’s essay helped frame the catalog for Malofiej 27.
Perhaps our most rewarding moment this year came as our expertise was shared by exactly the right people at the right time. During the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic, our community stepped up to share expertise and raise awareness. Our COVID articles are among our most widely shared, and we’d like to think that they helped our community help explain the data to the wider world around us.
What’s next?
We have some pretty cool ideas about how to continue to serve our DVS members and the wider dataviz community. There will be more thematic projects, more commissioned visualizations, and even some surprises! But more than anything we are thankful for the support of the DVS and the support of the wider data visualization community. It’s really a pleasure to be part of the community.
If you are a DVS member, you can find all of our article “friend links” in our DVS Slack channel and Discourse site. Drop me a message if you need help finding something.
If you want to join the DVS, it’s free — and fun! datavisualizationsociety.com
Here are 2 of the 4 articles that we launched with a year ago:
A few articles about COVID-19 and how dataviz has been so important in understanding it:
And here are a bunch of great articles:
