A newsletter to learn about practical ways to decolonize your research and data work-lives with byte-sized drabbles about the daily life of a data professional.
Behind the Scenes: Doodling and Game Jams
Characters I doodled for the video game jam that didn’t make it into the game.
Hello hello! I spent all of September working on art direction and art assets for a video game jam. The postmortems just wrapped over the weekend and now I’m moving back to working on my Ren’py Dungeons-and-Dragons style grocery store RPG.
At the end of each jam I’m always left with this feeling of like “I really making video games, but maybe I want to try [enter new developer component here].” Maybe sound design next time?
- Dana
Curated Content: 3 Ways to Build Your Data Portfolio
A portfolio is the people you know (your peers), your work output, your past gigs, and your skills.
I’m always looking for professional organizations for data work. I’ve worked with ones like the Museum Computer Network, American Library Association, Digital Library Federation, and International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, but there’s so many others out there.
It’s good to join some kind of professional network because you can meet peers, learn more about the kinds of data work that exists out there across countries and sectors, and build portfolio projects. Personally I like more development projects right now, but these three seemed really interesting.
1 - Techfleet
Scope: Volunteer with peers over discord to build a data project with a real nonprofit. This is free, fully remote. They also offer a $50 USD masterclass with live class session for industry-focused training.
Good for: Project management, UX Design, Development, Agile, UX Research & Writing
2 - DataKind
Scope: Professional network where you apply to open calls they post to work on specific data projects with nonprofit data for poverty, healthcare access, climate change, etc. This is free, fully remote.
Good For: Data analysts, Data Scientists, Data Visualization, Project management
3 - Statistics Without Borders
Scope: Professional network where you apply to open calls they post to work on civic and humanitarian projects related to statistics, data science and data analytics. This is free, fully remote.
Good for: Improving your hard technical skills in things like Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics), R, Python, MATLAB, and SAS.
Curated Content: Deaf Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (DGLAM) Online Directory
DGLAM is an online directory created by Jerrod J. Grill for resources on deaf cultural institutions. It has Google Map integrations and cool UX Design. I like the immersive design.
Jerrod also made a dataset and published it in Harvard’s Dataverse for researchers and community to use: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/70A2QQ
