Rahul Bhargava
@rahulbot
Creative data & computational journalism. "Community Data" book eBook and pre-order available:
I approve of the font options for customizing your Swiss Army Knife. I’d pick Futura… you?
As a US citizen in Berlin, it's impossible to overstate how hard the Nazi and Stasi museums hit right now. The first few parts of *every* exhibit echo what is happening in the US. I know people are saying it, but seeing it here is different. 🧵
Great example of interactive exhibit design at the Disgusting Food Museum in Berlin. This box releases a terrible smell and captures how your reaction changes in photos. A delightful piece I'll use in my future interactive exhibit design teaching 👏🏽 disgustingfoodmuseum.berlin/en/disgustin...
Powerful data mural in Berlin: artist Susanne Kunjappu-Jellinek commemorates the 136 people who were killed while trying to escape over the wall from GDR. Each flower represents one individual, and the text highlights escape as a form of resistance. www.chronik-der-mauer.de/en/sites/184...
New work from SDU using Media Could to help study where Danes get their news in an election season, where political elites post (& partisanship), and related chatbot use. Great example of cross platform work to understand an information ecosystem more. findresearcher.sdu.dk/ws/portalfil...
Funding Opp: We (Data Theatre Collaborative) wabt to see what you think community data theatre can be! With Association of Theatre in Higher Education we're offing pilot grants for faculty, students, artists, community orgs, and civic folks. 📆 Apply by Oct 1 www.athe.org/page/dtgrants
The Data Theatre Collaborative is prepping new community performances about food security for early Aug. So excited to be invited to rehearsals again, looking at SNAP and food bank data in the Boston area.
Amazing performance by 🇨🇻 with a draw against 🇪🇸!!! Boston has one of the biggest US populations of Cabo Verdians. So happy for my neighbors 🎉
News: I’ll be doing this Professor thing for a while 😄🎉 Giant hugs & thanks to amazing partners, colleagues & mentors who’ve supported me and given me opportunities on the way to tenure. I hope I can meet the high bar to create impact & nurture future academics and practitioners across the domains.
The World Cup is here!!! Honored to be playing at local FanFests around Boston with my Brazilian drum troop. Come and watch the games with us this week 🎉 Fri: Fan Fest Boston @ 2pm Sat: Fan Fest Everett @ 5pm Sun: Fan Fest Chelsea @ 12:30pm, 3pm, 6pm
How can off-the-shelf tech help hyperlocal newsrooms assess their coverage against their mission? Older work (finally) published in News Research Journal, with former Scope editor @thescopenu.bsky.social & @megheckman.bsky.social. "A content audit case study" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
I'm off to @icwsm.bsky.social this week, presenting our new dataset @mediacloud.bsky.social paper. This documents the datasets, and context, of our re-engineered online news archive and the directory of media sources that feeds it. Come say hi if you're here too. 👋🏽 ojs.aaai.org/index.php/IC...
ICYMI for US data wranglers: CT changed from counties to "planning regions" and that's been rolling out across census data over the last few years. I'm updating an my our-cup app for this year's World Cup and (surprise!) needed to update my static list of counties 😤 firstlogic.com/insights/con...
The knots at the top of each represented our year or arrival, encoded via one of the conventions from Incan times. Then below we were invited to add strips of fabric that represented important life milestones, each color indicating a category.
Lucky to participate in a wonderful workshop from local artist Laidy Saenz on making Incan-inspired Quipu to tell our own histories of migration. The activity led to sharing of some amazing stories of the journeys of my immigrant neighbors. A lovely invitation to make and share 👏🏽
Another set of work from my data storytelling students . We played with making data sonifications with TwoTone as an in-class exercise. They found it fun and interesting , but not very strong in narrative capacity. 🤔 Here's a video demo with snippets
Shoutout for CNN web editors for bringing us the headline of the day 👏🏽🤦🏽♂️
Random new work: recently I took a super-fun weekend "Steampunkinetics" class with Bruce Rosembaum and I made some pieces I'm proud of! More photos at www.connectionlab.org/studio-art
Boston friends: I'm honored to be invited with Grooversity to play at the @bostonlegacyfc.com "Noite Brasil" on Tuesday @ Gillette Stadium! Marta vs. Gutierres ⚽️🎉🪘See you there! Special discount tix www.gofevo.com/event/Groove...
* real estate prices and farming in New England: Datawrapper choropleth
More student work from my undergrad data storytelling class🎉 They wrote data stories that centered map-based visuals. Datawrapper, StoryMaps, Tableau, Flourish. 🧵
🏆 "Data Drums" won a 2026 Data Sonification Award! I'm excited to continue exploring the overlaps between percussion performance and data storytelling 🪘👏🏽📊 Big thanks to my amazing co-creators Marcus Santos & Lily Gabaree and the performers. dataculture.northeastern.edu/2026/04/29/d...
📆 Next virtual data crafting circle from @datavizsociety.bsky.social is Monday night the 27th. Sadly it conflicts with the in-person studio nights we run in our garage, so I can't join. But maybe you're free? www.eventbrite.com/e/data-craft...
More @mediacloud.bsky.social behind-the-scenes: this new viz shows us how stories move through our ingestion system. About 85% of the URLs we fetched over two days made it into our index. Great work from our dev team 👏🏽 I love a good sankey diagram!
It was my birthday recently and I thought all you data nerds might enjoy this card my family got me last year 🤣