Nightingale: Our First Year
By: Jason Forrest
Tags: Data Visualization, Data, Dataviz, Data Humanism, Dvsintro

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.

Initial concepts for Nightingale’s logo

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.