Hey! 👋
Welcome to Kawan—our vibrant community of data heads and storytellers. We’re all about improving data literacy and sharing nuanced stories about Asia. Come hang!
My grandma does decolonial work — issue #60
What can we build with our real and righteous rage? — Pooja Nansi, The Feelings of Brown People: A Radio Dedication Show with a Forever Engaged Hotline In our October issue, Peiying wrote about how we formed a reading club around coloniality, knowledge, and being. In these sessions, we discussed the
How might we visualise the Ethnic Integration Policy quota in a HDB block to help people understand how it works?
Singapore’s Ethnic Integration Policy (EIP) allocates quotas in public housing blocks based on ethnicity. In our final longform piece of 2024, we examined the EIP and its impact on homeowners, particularly those from minority ethnic groups. In this process, we created interactive visuals to help explain the EIP. In
Asia's majestic forests — issue #22
Two years ago, I managed to catch The Great Animal Orchestra, an exhibition of animal recordings captured in the wild by bioacoustician Bernie Krause. In a pitch black room, the bright bars of a spectrogram flashed on the walls, freezing each species' cries in the forest. It was a
Answering students’ questions about data storytelling—an inexhaustive guide
Last month, Mick and I had the great fortune of conducting office hours for students from the University of Applied Sciences Amsterdam…
Meet the Community! Catherine Ma, Communications PhD student at University of Miami
We’re excited to bring you our first interview of our Community initiative! Launched in late February, we’ve been hungrily scouring the…
Konti goes on an excursion to Yale-NUS!
Our mission? To coach Yale-NUS students to tell the best data story they can in a data competition!
A country of immigrants — issue #21
The history of humankind is one of migration. We only ever leave our homes in search of a better life elsewhere, and that has been the force moving human beings out of Africa and into human settlements all across the world. We all seek the same things in new lands—
Humans of Kontinentalist: Munirah Mansoor
I sat down with Munirah, who is learning about the art of visualising information during her 9-month traineeship at Kontinentalist.
What we did to prepare ourselves as first-time speakers at the Outlier data vis conference
Outlier was a much-celebrated online conference by the Data Visualization Society (DVS) that took place from 4–8 February 2021
Open for a surprise! — issue #20
Here at notes from the equator, we "see" each other more than once a year, but...have you noticed something different about us? 😗 That's right, we've had a facelift! Our newsletter has changed quite a bit since it began in September 2019. We started
Introducing our community section on Medium—and call for submissions! 🎉
At the recent Outlier conference hosted by Data Visualisation Society, Kontinentalist hosted an informal video call (an “unconference”)…
Humans of Kontinentalist: Amanda Teo (again!)
Amanda was our design intern in 2018, and we welcomed her back two years later as a UX Architect! Fun fact, the animation you see on our…
Filling our tummies and enriching our minds at Spice Zi
When you create something, the reaction to your creation is often hard to anticipate. Upon release of our story on chilli sauces in Asia…
Are you prepared for the new year? — issue #19
As 2020 rolled out (at last!), I did something I'd never done before—I paid for a tarot card reading. I'd never been one for the supernatural, but I found it a useful way to check in about where things are and how one might look
