Possibly as early as elementary school, but certainly by middle school, we’ve been introduced to the classic questions that journalists try to answer: who, what, where, when, how, and why. Colloquially known, inaccurately, as the Five Ws, these questions were the basis of how I was taught to write book reports, essays about current events, papers for history and social studies classes, and just about every other multi-paragraph assignment for the duration of my academic caree

We’re all in this dataviz field for different specific reasons, but I’d like to think one commonality among us is the belief in objective truth. Facts are facts. You can’t argue with the numbers. Evidence beats speculation. Cite your sources. And so on. And in the course of performing our jobs, we strive to be as faithful to the facts as we possibly can be. We don’t create intentionally misleading interfaces, or conjecture wildly about causality. We let the data speak for its

Before we get started, let me reassure you: this is neither a year in review, nor a "my goals for 2018" post. As a person who still feels a little awkward about being his own advocate (despite multiple social media presences as evidence to the contrary), and who openly expresses his fear of thinking out loud, I am reluctant to drag the public along on a tour of my personal points of pride from the last year, nor to let people in on my half-formed ambitions and ideas for the