Jer Thorp
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Artist, author, birder & nudibranch enthusiast. Author of Living in Data (2021) and We Were Out Counting Birds (2025).
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Articles by Jer Thorp
Every bird counted on Point Pelee , Ont. in one year
Every bird counted on Point Pelee, Ont. in one year Artist Jer Thorp creates a visual checklist of every bird counted in one year on the southernmost point of mainland Canada A red-headed woodpecker photographed in Point Pelee National Park. (Photo: Sebastian Simic/Can Geo Photo Club) Expand Image Jer Thorp’s “Every Bird” poster series is proof that big data can be beautiful.
A Time for Invitation.
Last Monday morning, I went looking for a cuckoo. The one I was searching for was the yellow-billed variety, a robin-sized bird with a white breast and long striped tail. They have thick curved beaks whose bottom halves are the exact color of a lemon. Cuckoos shouldn’t be tough birds to spot, but they are. Notoriously, emphatically so. They’re unreasonably good at staying out of sight. My friend Mike gave me a solid piece of birding advice a few years ago: Never chase a cuckoo.
Installation And Maintenance Guide
By Jer Thorp Last week I watched a viral video of a commencement where the speaker urged the new grads to build and tune their "idiot detection systems". It's a good speech and even better advice. As we head into 2024 and another year of hype around AI, I'd urge everyone to make sure their AI Grift Detectors are fully functional.
The Feminist Bird Club's Birding for a Better World: A Guide to Finding Joy and Community in Nature
(Author) (Author) FORMAT Paperback$22.95$21.34(English) Buy new or used from an indie through our partner Biblio: Price Condition Seller "Through the Feminist Bird Club, Molly Adams and Sydney Golden Anderson have walked the walk of inclusive birding; in Birding for a Better World, they talk the talk--this book got me to examine overlooked injustices, in and out of birding." --Christian Cooper, author of Better Living Through Birding and host/consulting producer of National Geographic's...
Prophet a book by Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché
(Author) (Author) FORMAT Hardcover$29.00$26.97(English) Buy new or used from an indie through our partner Biblio: Price Condition Seller From the extraordinary minds of award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author of H Is for Hawk Helen Macdonald and first time author Sin Blaché, Prophet is their electric debut, a tantalizing adventure fusing noir, sci-fi and a slow burn queer romance--set in a universe just one perilous step from our own.
All The Names: Algorithmic Design and the 9/11 Memorial
This post was originally published on June 10, 2011 on my blog. Since that link is pretty hard to find, I’m re-publishing it here. In late October, 2009, I received an e-mail from Jake Barton from Local Projects, titled plainly ‘Potential Freelance Job’. I read the e-mail, and responded with a reply in two parts: First, I would love to work on the project. Second, I wasn’t sure that it could be done. The project was to design an algorithm for placement of names on the 9/11 memorial in New York City.
Visualizing 138 Years of Popular Science
This post was originally published on my blog on October 25th, 2011. Near the end of this summer, I was asked by the publishers of Popular Science magazine to produce a visualization piece that explored the archive of their publication. PopSci has a history that spans almost 140 years, so I knew there would be plenty of material to draw from.
Visualizing a Nation’s DNA
This story was originally published on my blog on June 19th, 2009. I’m moving it here for posterity. In the spring, I was asked by Wired UK if I would be interested in producing something for the two-page ‘infoporn’ spread that runs in every issue. They had seen my experimentations with the NYTimes APIs, and were interested in the idea of non-conventional data visualizations. After a bit of research, I proposed an piece about the UK’s National DNA Database.
Episode 3: The Disclaimer Episode
I’ve done a lot of things to find birds. For starters, I’ve gotten up really early in the morning. Way before sunrise, at times of the day which up until then had seemed theoretical. I’ve gone to some strange places, too. To a research camp in the middle of the Cameroonian jungle. To a marsh near JFK airport where we found a whole abandoned wharf in the reeds, complete with a jet-ski. To a Maya ruin on the Yucatan peninsula. To Staten Island.
The Disclaimer Episode on Apple Podcasts
I’ve done a lot of things to find birds. For starters, I’ve gotten up really early in the morning. Way before sunrise, at times of the day which up until then had seemed theoretical. I’ve gone to some strange places, too. To a research camp in the middle of the Cameroonian jungle. To a marsh near JFK airport where we found a whole abandoned wharf in the reeds, complete with a jet-ski. To a Maya ruin on the Yucatan peninsula. To Staten Island.
Once Upon a Checklist
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Episode 2: This Episode Contains Multitudes
On the first episode of Once Upon a Checklist we heard about the intimate experience of spending time with a single bird. In our case - in Don Roberson’s case - it was one of the last Guam Flycatchers alive on earth. It was a sad story. This time we’re going full speed in the other direction. Toward joy, and glee, and huge numbers of birds. Really immense numbers of birds. Really very colossally spectacular numbers of birds. — Special thanks to Kathy Mihm Dunning and Van Remsen.
Once Upon a Checklist
On the first episode of Once Upon a Checklist we heard about the intimate experience of spending time with a single bird. In our case - in Don Roberson’s case - it was one of the last Guam Flycatchers alive on earth. It was a sad story. This time we’re going full speed in the other direction. Toward joy, and glee, and huge numbers of birds. Really immense numbers of birds. Really very colossally spectacular numbers of birds. — Special thanks to Kathy Mihm Dunning and Van Remsen.
OUAC Print #1: Guam's Lost Endemics
Did you know that Once Upon a Checklist is a podcast, and a print series? Along with each episode I’m going to be making a unique piece of artwork that will sit alongside the stories that I discovered while exploring each month’s checklist. I decided when I started OUAC that I’d give myself two challenges for the prints: Each one would involve some kind of hand-drawn element. I’ve been drawing birds on and off for a few years now and I wanted a chance to build this skill a little bit.
Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future (Paperback)
$18.00 On Our Shelves Now Nolita 12 on hand, as of Dec 22 8:33am (DIGITAL CULTURE) Williamsburg 7 on hand, as of Dec 22 1:33am (DIGITAL CULTURE) Seaport 1 on hand, as of Dec 22 7:44am (DIGITAL CULTURE) Downtown Brooklyn 6 on hand, as of Dec 22 9:06am (DIGITAL CULTURE) Description Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic...
Episode 1: The Saddest Checklist In The World
On August 29th 1978, Don Roberson drove in a rental car up to a scrubby limestone forest on the North end of Guam. Using a hand-made guidebook he’d drawn himself with coloured pencils, Don managed to find and identify two of Guam’s rare endemic birds: The Guam Rail and the Guam Flycatcher. He didn’t know it at the time, but both of those birds would go extinct in the next five years.
Once Upon a Checklist on Apple Podcasts
3 episodes Writer and National Geographic Explorer Jer Thorp takes listeners on fact-filled, far-flung journeys to flush out the human stories behind some of birding's most unusual checklists. Absorbing for birders and non-birders alike, Once Upon a Checklist will change the way you think about birds and the people who love (and count) them.
Introducing Once Upon a Checklist
Every day birders from all around the world make checklists. They tally tanagers, count crows, iterate ibis and enumerate emus. Just this month, people will submit more than one million lists to eBird, the world's most popular citizen science platform. A million checklists a month! That's a lot of counting, and a lot of numbers.
Introducing Once Upon A Checklist
Once Upon a Checklist is a podcast fully enamored with all of the messy human stories behind birding's tidy lists. The first episode will be released August 29th. Every day birders from all around the world make checklists. They tally tanagers, count crows, iterate ibis and enumerate emus. Just this month, people will submit more than one million lists to eBird, the world’s most popular citizen science platform. A million checklists a month! That’s a lot of counting, and a lot of numbers.
A Short Glossary of Delightful Library Terms
Von Frieling Sammelband, Accession #MS-65, Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia. Two weeks ago I asked Twitter if anyone had favourite obscure and/or delightful library or archival words. Here are some of the best replies: Tête-bêche: From philately, meaning printed upside down or sideways relative to another.
A 2021 Gift Guide For Birders
If you have birder in your life and you yourself are not a birder, you might be starting to sweat a little. It’s a high-risk proposal to pick a gift for someone who’s really into something that you’re not really into. Here’s a list of suggestions that might just help you out… This is an area where gift-givers can really shine, if their birder is a bit of a beginner, or if they have a pair of Clinton era binoculars that they might be too sheepish or too stubborn to replace.
A Harness For a Hornbill
Nick Russo weighs a black-casqued hornbill in the Dja Reserve in Cameroon while guide Luc Mbembo waits to assist with tagging the bird. Nick Russo is wearing one sock and holding a small dinosaur. For a few moments it is settled in his arms, wings held tightly against its body, and then it erupts with a squawk-squeal-scream that hurts my ears and makes me think of Laura Dern. Nick is an ornithologist and the dinosaur is his study bird, the black-casqued hornbill.
Living in Data
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Birds and The Fine Art of Noticing
A new generation of post-pandemic birders can change the way we see our cities If you were to wake up tomorrow from sixteen months of fairy-tale sleep, you’d probably have a few questions. What the heck is a delta variant? What happened to restaurant menus? When did all of my friends become birdwatchers? On the last Monday in May of this year, 1,046 birders in New York State submitted checklists to Cornell University’s wildly popular eBird project, counting 247 differently-feathered species.
Birds and The Fine Art of Noticing
If you were to wake up tomorrow from sixteen months of fairy-tale sleep, you’d probably have a few questions. What the heck is a delta variant? What happened to restaurant menus? When did all of my friends become birdwatchers? On the last Monday in May of this year, 1,046 birders in New York State submitted checklists to Cornell University’s wildly popular eBird project, counting 247 differently-feathered species.
Yes, algorithms can be biased. But they have an even bigger danger
By jer thorp 6 minute Read Algorithms hold a pivotal and particularly mysterious place in public discussions around data. We speak of Google’s and Facebook’s algorithms as wizards’ spells, cryptic things that we couldn’t possibly understand. Algorithmic bias is raised in almost every data discussion, in classrooms and congressional hearings, as if all of us have some kind of shared definition of what an algorithm is and just exactly how it might be biased.
How Do Targeted Ads Work?
When I was 35, I collected every ad that popped into my browser for a month. It was a lot of ads: more than 3,000 in total. I hadn’t done this on a whim. I was working with my team at the Office for Creative Research to build a tool called Floodwatch, a browser extension that allowed anyone to collect and view all of the web ads that were being targeted toward them. The project was born from a conversation I fell into one morning, on a train from Oxford to London, with Ashkan Soltani.
Who is “Public” Data Really For?
“Public” is a word that has, in the last decade, become bound tightly to data. Loosely defined, any data that is available in the public domain falls into this category, but the term is most often used to describe data that might serve some kind of civic purpose: census data or environmental data or health data, along with transparency-focused data like government budgets and reports.
Living in Data | Jer Thorp | Macmillan
Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.” To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold, and...
Living in Data | Jer Thorp | Macmillan
Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.” To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold, and...
March 2021 Issue | Harper's Magazine
[Harper’s Index] Minimum number of new users who registered with the stock-trading app Robinhood between January and April last year : 3,000,000 Share [Harper’s Index] Estimated portion of countries that will be poorer per capita in 2100 than they would have been without climate change : 3/4 Share [Harper’s Index] Percentage change in the frequency of “arrests with force” made by NYPD officers when they are equipped with body cameras : +1.9 Share [Harper’s Index] Percentage by which elderly...
The Hard Work of Remembering
This morning, my family and I walked over the Manhattan bridge to the Lower East Side, to write two names on the sidewalk in chalk: Joseph Wilson and Fannie Lansner. Both twenty-two when they died, both workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, both Russian Immigrants, both living in the same low-rent neighbourhood near the foot of The Bowery. Both killed in a fire 110 years ago today. The address where Joseph Wilson lived - 84 Christie - is now a park, so we wrote his name beside the playground.
Living in Data | Jer Thorp | 9780374189907 | NetGalley
Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.” To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statisti-fied, sold, and...
Theory of Data Transformation
From Living in Data, which will be published in May by MCD, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thorp is a data artist and an instructor at New York University. “Data” has always been a restless word. It first appeared in the English language on loan from Latin, where it meant “a thing given, a gift delivered or sent.” It spent its early years in the shared custody of theology and mathematics.
Living In Data: A Citizen's Guide To A Better Information Future
Earn 190 plum® points Buy Online Ship to an address Pre-order online. Free shipping on orders over $35 Pick up in store To see if pickup is available, Prices and offers may vary in store A provocative, eye-opening, example-laden exploration of our current and future relationship with data In the fall of 2009, the data artist Jer Thorp wrote a pair of algorithms to inscribe names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan.
Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future
Description Jer Thorp's analysis of the word "data" in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with "data," we find not only its classic companions "information" and "digital," but also a variety of new neighbors--from "scandal" and "misinformation" to "ethics," "friends," and "play." To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statisti-fied,...
Buy books online. Support local bookstores.
By Jer Thorp This is a list of books that inspired me as I was writing Living in Data. Some of these made it into the manuscript in some form, but all of them played a role in what words eventually found their way onto the page.
We're looking for a Community Manager!
From the outset of the project, we’ve imagined FieldKit as being three things at the same time. First, it’s sensing hardware, open-source and modular and custom-built to be easy to use and durable. Second, it’s a software platform for managing, analyzing and the data that the stations collect. Finally, FieldKit is a place for people who are curious (professionally or otherwise) about the world around them to come together to share, learn, question, and contribute.
#FieldKit50: Earth Day Giveaway
April 21, 2020 Posted by Jer Thorp Uncategorized 0 thoughts on “#FieldKit50: Earth Day Giveaway” To mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day we’re giving away 50 FieldKits to scientists, students, teachers, activists and community leaders around the world. On April 22nd, 1970, twenty million Americans took to the streets.
AI’s Unequal Futures: Yvette
Three years ago, with Kate Crawford, Meredith Whittaker, and Ian Ardouin-Fumat, I made a project called Unequal Futures, which explored the social impacts of AI, at present and into the future. Most importantly, the project pointed to the fact that there is no broad ‘we’ in AI; these technologies affect people differently depending on their own specific profiles of risk.
The Abridged Mueller Report
The Mueller report is 203,028 words long. Here’s a much shorter version, centered around its primary subject. The President said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” The President had not directed Flynn to discuss sanctions with Kislyak. The President told White House Counsel Donald McGahn to stop Sessions from recusing. The President took Sessions aside at an event and urged him to “unrecuse.” The President was personally under investigation.
Woke-washing IBM’s Dirty Computers
Last month, IBM ran a minute-long ad during the Oscars, titled ‘Let’s Put Smart To Work.’ Backed by a dramatic string score, the spot features a sequence of famous people — singer and actress Janelle Monae, spelling bee champion Akash Vukoti, Open Source software advocate Bruce Perens, Me Too movement founder Tarana Burke, astronaut Buzz Aldrin… and for some reason Arianna Huffington. In the ad, the celebrities We-Are-The-World their way through an ‘open letter to tech’.
Woke-washing IBM’s Dirty Computers
Last month, IBM ran a minute-long ad during the Oscars, titled ‘Let’s Put Smart To Work.’ Backed by a dramatic string score, the spot features a sequence of famous people — singer and actress Janelle Monae, spelling bee champion Akash Vukoti, Open Source software advocate Bruce Perens, Me Too movement founder Tarana Burke, astronaut Buzz Aldrin… and for some reason Arianna Huffington. In the ad, the celebrities We-Are-The-World their way through an ‘open letter to tech’.
Artist in the Archive on Apple Podcasts
8 episodes Join the Library of Congress’s Innovator-in-Residence Jer Thorp as he explores the 165 million items in the library’s collection and speaks with the librarians, archivist and technologists who try to make sense of it all. Join the Library of Congress’s Innovator-in-Residence Jer Thorp as he explores the 165 million items in the library’s collection and speaks with the librarians, archivist and technologists who try to make sense of it all.
"It's , so here's a story. When I was about 22 I worked as a naturalist at the Vancouver Aquarium (@vanaqua)... As well as ta […]" #WorldOctopusDay
It's #WorldOctopusDay, so here's a story. When I was about 22 I worked as a naturalist at the Vancouver Aquarium (@vanaqua)... As well as talking to people about the exhibits, putting on puppet shows, narrating beluga whale sessions, etc., I was on the dive team...
Transcript: Artist in the Archive Episode 7 - The Serendipity Episode
Transcript: Artist in the Archive Episode 7 — The Serendipity Episode Here’s a transcript from the latest episode of Artist in the Archive. You can listen to the full episode here. Jer Thorp: Let’s start with a story about two men named Horace. One of them was Horace Walpole, son of the first British Prime Minister: parliamentarian, art collector, wanderer, man of letters, and the author of the first Gothic novel.
Transcript: Artist in the Archive Episode 6 - Be The Bit
Here’s a transcript from the latest episode of Artist in the Archive. You can listen to the full episode here. David Brunton: 412,175,852 JPEG, 42,324,945 PDF, 11,854,378 TXT, 2,207,725 Word docs, 1,042,624 Excel files, 11,041,834 SWF, 6,722,968 MP4, 1,165,842 MPEG, 1,336,326 GZIP, 323,498 PowerPoint. Jer Thorp: A year ago in the first episode of Artist in the Archive, I stood in front of one of the library’s huge old card catalogs in the basement of the Madison Building.
We, The Technocrats
In Brussels he spoke of courage, of defending principles, of cultivating a ‘healthy suspicion of authority.’ He lavished praise on the GDPR, and called for a new comprehensive privacy law in the United States. He admonished the practice of collecting personal data and demolished big tech’s favorite talking point, that privacy for users needs to be weighed against profit. He quoted Thoreau. It wasn’t exactly the speech you might have expected from the CEO of the worlds’ most successful tech company.
#Serendipity Run: Finders Guide – blprnt – Medium
On Thursday November 8th, I’m taking over the Library of Congress’ Twitter feed for an experiment in collective serendipity. Any one can join in — our goal is to find as many interesting things as we can from the collection and to connect those items through vectors of chance, whimsy, and personal experience. Here’s a short guide to finding interesting things amongst the Library’s 180M objects and 500M digital assets: 1.
A Search for the Heart
El proyecto Computando la Historia Cultural en la Nube finalizó en 2024. The Computing Cultural Heritage for the Cloud project wrapped up in 2024. Uno de los resultados centrales del proyecto fue el diseño de paquetes de datos significativos, que traen contexto e información técnica diseñada para ayudar a la gente a comprender los potenciales usos computacionales de los materiales de la Biblioteca.
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