Project Description

How can we communicate data to tell compelling stories? This course works with a community partner to understand their data and research. We then draw on visual story telling to present the research to wider public audiences. The forms of story-telling could include zines, community maps, text mining analysis, or explanatory video essays. Examples of such work are on our collaborative teaching site: teachingfeminisms.net

Middlebury Contact: Hemangini Gupta

racial justice; gender and sexuality studies; immigration rights


The faculty member was a print and TV journalist for five years before completing a PhD in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies. They teach classes in feminist and queer theory and critical race studies. They work with students to share research in formats accessible to broader public audiences through video essays, public exhibits, and narrative story-telling and have been developing these skills since 2012.


Training in visual story-telling, beginner’s knowledge of text mining, interest in how data can be communicated to wider publics


To develop the ability to read research outputs and data from community partner research or archives and translate these into meaningful stories for the wider public

To work with different forms of data visualization including visual story-telling, text mining, and analag forms such as zines

To reflect critically on the categorizations of data

To develop a plan for how to circulate the data so that it reaches the relevant community members and intended audience


This is a J-term course planned for four weeks of January 2022. The class will meet 3-4 times a week.


We will have an initial meeting before the semester begins (ideally in October or early November) during which the partner will share the research that they want communicated. In the first week of classes (mid-January 2022), the communicate partner will meet with the class for one hour each over 2 days in the first week to communicate their research and needs to the class (total of two hours). They will meet with us again over 2 hours over weeks 2 and 3. Students will present versions of their final project during these weeks. In the final week (four) students will present their work to the community partner over an hour allowing time for feedback if any and for general conversation reflecting on the process. The anticipated time from the community partner is thus 6 hours between October 202—end-January 2022.


teachingfeminisms.net has our current student work and pudding.cool is what we are hoping to approximate