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.

April 9, 2025— Hello! I hope this letter finds you on a magical quest to get blackberry cinnamon rolls. Just somewhere far away from looking at your 401k or Roth IRA. 🫠 

Curated Content: Publishing in the Archives Profession Blog

I came across this cool blog the other day when searching for places to post about Black Canvases (ISSN: 3066-8484), the zine I’m editing. You can still submit art, poetry, scholarship, photos, and more to the zine by June 11th!

I’ve never come across a resource quite like this. It shares new issues of journals, call for presentations and proposals, book launch events and has a great list of podcasts, awards to apply for, newsletters related to Archives. This blog is useful for data professionals across sectors because Archives as collecting places, employers, clients, and institutions connect to all data work. They seem to post daily, so check it out.

Curated Content: Mid Career Fellowship @ The Internet Society

This fellowship is for 15 mid-career professionals (at least 10 years of experience) to gain expertise in the Internet Critical Properties and Enablers, Digital Transformation and Key Internet Issues, Digital Futures and Strategic Foresight, Systems and Design Thinking, and Leadership and Decision-making.

It’s an online seven month program that includes live lectures and assessments and ends with a symposium showcasing your fellowship work. You get a Certificate of Completion for the Internet Society after the program!

Industry Insights: Ways to Promote Your Data Skills

Not all data work easily translates into sharing work samples. Digital asset management, metadata, cataloging/tagging, SQL querying, and database work is challenging to turn into a visual portfolio because it’s often CSV or spreadsheet based. We also can’t necessarily share the data we worked on. Moreover, a big issue is showcasing how you have skill sets in specific softwares advertised in job ads without owning an expensive subscription—for example an individual plan for Adobe Creative Suite is $60 USD/month, and Tableau is $75 USD/month.

So what do you do?

• Make a free website you consistently update. Use free platforms like substack, Github, or Wordpress to talk about the work you. Write blog posts describing your process for building a 3D model, the data challenges you see in your day-to-day adding assets to a DAM, or your opinion on the latest professional news in your sector.

• Add screenshots, gifs, and short-form videos. Take photos of yourself at conferences. Take screenshots of catalog records you made metadata for. Collect URLs to finding aids you wrote. Use tools like ScreenToGif to capture working on a computer doing your data work.

• Showcase stats that matter to your work. Your work output statistics could include the number of conferences talks you gave, DAM assets managed, or lines of code you worked on.

• Promote yourself. Everyone has a different comfort level talking about yourself to others. In my experience, a lot of data professionals have introvert tendencies. You can promote yourself through writing, giving workshops or talks in small group settings, handing out a business card, or using social media.

And remember: it’s about consistency, not quantity. To get people to see our stuff and our value/knowledge/personality, half of our job is to post, share, document, and market ourselves.