Here’s a peek at what the Spring 2025 Reference Guide has in store.
We’re happy to announce the Data Literacy Program’s (DLP’s) Spring 2025 Reference Guide. Formerly known as the Table of Contents, this Version 3.0 of that document provides short introductions for all our Digital Data Stories.
Version 3.0 is our final design for the Reference Guide as the Data Literacy Program wraps up in the coming year. That means there have been some significant changes to develop this Spring 2025 version.
Here’s an example of what the series section pages look like in the Spring 2025 Reference Guide.
For this release, we added new content, such as references and links to our Series on Series articles at the beginning of each series’ section. This allowed us to include more information about why we developed Digital Data Stories in each series without adding much more text. We also added information about our new Data Story Shorts so that folks can learn about those resources. The shorts are a new addition from 2025 and provide succinct summaries of select data literacy skills. You can read more about them here and expect to see us share more shorts in the future!
We also added credits for all the images in the guide. These images give people a taste for what each Digital Data Story is about or provide clear icons for relevant concepts. We credit all those visuals at the end of the document. That section include hyperlinks to the images’ sources so folks can trace their provenance back from our modified versions to their original versions. You can learn more about how we sourced our visuals for this and our other resources in our Sourcing Series.
This is our new “How to read the entries” infographic!
Another change is that while we still provide our data literacy icons (as seen in earlier Table of Contents and the Aggregative Series Digital Data Stories) in both color and greyscale, we’ve decided to keep the Digital Data Story entries tagged exclusively with the greyscale icons. While the color ones are pretty on screen, when printed in greyscale, all the color icons look basically the same. So we stuck with the high contrast grey versions throughout the document that print better in greyscale. However, since we’ve gone grey(scale) we updated the infographic in our “How to Use this Guide” section to reflect that different color scheme and clarified some of the wording in that image.
We also added QR codes for each Digital Data Story to increase accessibility on different devices. That way if people see a Digital Data Story they like while scrolling or flipping through the Reference Guide, they can easily check it out on mobile. This makes it easy for folks to browse on the go and for students to access them on their phones. However, we also kept the hyperlinks for the different parts of each Digital Data Story because those are easier to click on when you browse on computer or tablet.
Here’s our new Digital Data Story “To Disrupt and Delight” learn more in the full Reference Guide.
We also added a new Data Story, To Disrupt and Delight: Teaching Archaeology Through Narrative, to our guide. An entry in our Publication Series, it guides users through critical reflection and reading. It also has a playable game folks can use to make their own data story. It’s a fun combination of resources so we encourage folks to explore it in more detail.
Regardless of whether you’ve watched the evolution of these documents or this is the first version you’ve explored, we hope that the Reference Guide gives you a taste of the Digital Data Stories and how you can incorporate them into your pedagogy. While Version 3.0 won’t be the final version of the Reference Guide, it’ll be the last major update we’ll do to the document.
So, if you’d like to learn more about the purpose of our Reference Guides, which we didn’t cover in this post, read our articles about the Fall 2022 and the Winter 2024 versions. If these Digital Data Stories inspire you, consider inviting a member of the DLP Team to guest lecture in your next class, so please reach out with questions or inquiries at datastories@opencontext.org.
Credits
Unless specified otherwise below, the text and images in this document are licensed CC BY by Paulina F. Przystupa / the DLP. In order of appearance this article includes:
“BlueVersion_Aurochs_skull” by L. Meghan Dennis from the DLP / CC BY 2.0 and includes an adaptation of “Aurochs skull” by Thomas Quine (uploaded by FunkMonk from the flickr file “Skull of a pre-historic cow“) from Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aurochs_skull.jpg) / CC BY 2.0 within the infographic image.
Also within the infographic are icons adapted by L. Meghan Dennis and Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP / CC BY. From top to bottom those are “Reading_IconE3E3E3-blackOutline-01”, “WorkingWith_IconACACAC-01”, “Analyzing_icon757575-01”, “Arguing_Icon464646-01”; and “Communicating Icon-Color” which include “Books” (https://thenounproject.com/icon/books-4439922/), “File” (https://thenounproject.com/icon/file-1331311/), “School laptop” (https://thenounproject.com/icon/school-laptop-1675142/), “Debate” (https://thenounproject.com/icon/debate-776656/), and “Internet” (https://thenounproject.com/icon/internet-1771870/) by Made by Made (Made x Made) from the Noun Project under a royalty free license. Four of these are repeated in the Digital Data Story Entry.
The Digital Data Story entry also includes the image “DataStoriesToDelightAndDisrupt_ReflectionGuide” by Paulina F. Przystupa from the DLP / CC BY which is an adaptation of “Figure 014 from Africa/Egypt/Abydos/Operation 203” by Matthew Douglas Adams from Open Context (https://n2t.net/ark:/28722/k23r17177) / CC BY.
