Why the Name Datum?
“Talk Data to Me!” is not likely to be a sentence you hear in your day to day. In fact I imagine for most folks its the last thing you want to hear or read.
I’ve built a 15 year career in data science, education, and tech by “talking data” with all types of folks, no matter their background or affinity for vectors. Why?
Well, because data provides the foundation for our living context. Put more rightly, without folks in the past talking data rightly, our world, our present would look alot worse than it does. And while there are only a select number of “data professionals”, we’re all data people. We all simply need to find a common start point.
In philosophy and logic, much like the literal definition, this newsletter is a starting point.
We write, record, and engage for folks just like you!
Who is Datum for?
Datum1 is for entrepreneurs, educators, veterans, cultural workers, tech practitioners, researchers, and community organizers.
Datum is for data people and people who don’t know they’re data people yet.
Datum is for those who wonder, “who makes money off my post, memes, and the things our phone remembers?” For those tired of extratctive systems, and who want tools-not just theory- to reclaim data, transform institutions, and build futures that sustain, preserve, and empower community stewards.
Datum is for afrofuturists, coconspirators of alternative futures, and engineers of collective memory making. Datum is here for all who want to practice remembrance, remembering the past, rightly, while designing the future.
Why a Newsletter?
We give and receive data nearly every second of every day, we should be able to discuss how our data is activated and what decisions we can make today with our data and knowledge that will shape our tomorrow.
Data is modern data oil, and you’re the refinery. At least that’s how we all typically experience data, it being extracted from us. Datum is here as a gather space for folks of all walks of life to sit in a digital cypher, and share a communal experience of “data talk”.
Dautm is a newsletter curated by me, its full of stories, insights, interviews, and techniques to better understanding your data body, community, and ecosystem.
Enjoy your read? Subscribe below! As a newsletter you’ll be invited monthly to join discussions, watch content, and learn more about Data & Ai, Afrofuturism, the reality of Data, Education, & Race, more about Cypher, and our collective memory building project, Remembrance Day.
- LITERAL DEFINITION | A datum is a single piece of information, such as a fact, statistic, or code; it is the singular form of “data” and is often an observable starting point. ↩︎
Wanna Jump In?
Here are some links to things we’ve written over the years broken down by Datum Topic: Data & AI | Afrofuturism in Practice | Education x Data x Race | Cypher & Founder Updates | Rememberance Day Spotlights
Stay Connected and Look Out for Live Cyphers and other Activations