Who is Nightingale for?
“Who is Nightingale for?”
It’s a question I’ve been asked point-blank by friends and coworkers and one that hovers beneath the surface in certain online conversations. For some it is a practical question: does reading this provide value to me? But for others the question is more fundamental: do I even belong here?
So who is Nightingale for? The easy answer is the dataviz community. But, in the 5 months since the launch of the Data Visualization Society and roughly 80 Medium stories later, a few things have become quite clear.
This community is expansive. We are designers who learned about data analysis and coding; we are scientists who learned about visual design and storytelling; we are computer programmers who learned about color theory and building visualizations. We all learned differently. Some of us have been doing this work for several decades — long before there were formalized programs — while others of us have never made visualizations professionally.
And if the dataviz community is hard to summarize, summarizing our audience is an impossible challenge. The work we create is used across all fields, from public health, to history, to sports, to… Beyoncé. We have used our own hobbies to inform our visualizations, and incorporated visualization work into our most special days. We have used visualization as a tool to challenge the utility of everyday objects, and to measure small victories. Here at Nightingale we encourage people from all backgrounds to submit articles that continue to add new voices to this conversation.
Know someone who’s unsure that Nightingale is for them? Share our homepage or one of the stories above and ask them to come explore.
Alyssa Bell ~ Editor, Nightingale
In case you missed our most recent articles:
Intricate & Visually Exciting: An Interview with Nadieh Brehmer
By Noëlle Rakotondravony and Jason Forrest
Nature By Design Part 1: How fauna and flora shaped the human mind
Democratizing Visualization By Lowering the Barrier of Entry
By Alberto Cairo & Simon Rogers
