Dear friends, Alberto Cairo here. Let’s begin with Open Visualization Academy (OVA) updates: We’re editing the master classes and tutorials that we’ll launch on January 31st, and we’re already planning for a second batch, which will probably land in the early Fall of 2026.

I’m also working on the structure of the OVA’s core class, a thorough introduction to information design and data visualization. If you want to get a taste of what this will look like, check the slides of three recent webinars I taught, sponsored by the great folks at the European Union’s office of communication (recordings will be online soon, I’ve been told). My OVA recording will be a much expanded version of that.

The full agenda of the Computation+Journalism Symposium is finally available. You can register here. Regular registration is $150 and only $30 for students.

I foresee that this won’t be a very large conference so, besides the great talks, workshops, and panels, it’ll be a good opportunity for networking. Join us in Miami!

I’ve been thinking a lot about courage lately, in part because I’ve been reading my UM colleague Blaine Fowers’s latest book, The Virtue of Courage.

This fascinating collection of essays reminds us that the foundational treaty on virtue ethics, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, discusses courage mainly as a martial virtue, but that today’s moral philosophers have a much broader view of it; they consider it also a civic virtue, a subsidiary and enabling one.

This is what they mean by subsidiary and enabling: We say that we have a virtue —justice, truthfulness, and so on — when we have acquired a disposition, an inclination to act in morally correct ways; however, without courage, inclinations may not lead to actions. Acting justly or truthfully, for example, often requires a willingness to take risks for a good cause, and to overcome the fear of harm.

I wonder why I found The Virtue of Courage to be such an absorbing read. It may be because since January of 2025 we've seen so many U.S. knowledge-creation and dissemination institutions (my world) abjectly yielding to a corrupt and authoritarian administration: News organizations weakening and softening their journalism, or sacrificing their standards to appease it; or universities sheepishly eliminating initiatives related to diversity, equity, inclusion, gender, or climate change — and even asking faculty to remove language about such matters from syllabi and classes.

In compensation, examples of courage that spring here and there are beacons in dark times. Mother Jones, for instance, a publication of uncompromising integrity which, along with ProPublica, is among the best in the U.S. when it comes to principled data-driven investigative reporting.

Mother Jones’s latest issue contains a series of short pieces that analyze and visualize the expansion of ICE’s reach. It made me realize that since the beginning of my career, the charts and infographics that I admire the most aren’t that sophisticated, innovative, or visually distinct; instead, they are exponents of what was once called The Journalism of Outrage: Their creators are motivated by an irresistible desire to expose and denounce, and to push for positive change.

Here are some photos:

Fowers’s The Virtue of Courage also reminds us that, like other virtues, courage is contagious because we humans tend to feel compelled to imitate behaviors that we deem exemplary (cowardice also spreads easily, of course). Virtue, then, has an individual and societal dimension; it’s more likely to flourish not in isolation, but in solidarity.

Nicolás Maduro stole the July of 2024 Venezuelan presidential election. How do we know? Because countless courageous private citizens, organized by the political opposition, photographed more than 80% of the tally sheets printed by voting machines, transcribed the data from them, and transformed it all into an online database. What an admirable act of crowdsourced data resistance.

(Mainstream news organizations such as Spain’s El País later published their own analysis and visualizations, which present the data in more detailed manner.)

Cases of collective courage need to spring from a single seed, though, an individual or small group of unique bravery. Catherine D’Ignazio’s Counting Feminicide (Catherine is a contributor to the Open Visualization Academy) presents many cases of that. The most famous is the Mapa de Feminicidios en México by engineer and human rights activist María Salguero (a new version of her map is in the works).

Between 2016 and 2021, Salguero documented around 10,000 femicides, manually assembling information from official records, news media, and other sources. Her map names every victim and, when possible, also the perpetrator and the circumstances of the crime.

It takes more than a bit of courage to design something like this in a country where misogynistic violence is widespread to this day.

I fear that in years to come, the need for projects like these —and more that I shall discuss here in the future— will increase. I wish we weren’t in interesting times, but as a certain British gentleman once wrote, “so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

So let’s decide.

I leave you with Nick Cave’s ethereal Bright Horses. You can find it in Ghosteen, the record he made after the death of his youngest son, Arthur. It’s a great listen, particularly if paired with Faith, Hope, and Carnage, a collection of Cage’s conversations with journalist Seán O’Hagan.