iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Sure, it's something you can find by reading -- but it's a gratifying sense of how visualization can tell a vivid story about data.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It turns out that (almost) all the chapters of Leviticus start the same way: "GOD spoke to Moses, saying:" I think it's pretty cool how that textual pattern pops right out of the interface.

Zoomed in further on Leviticus, and now highlighting Leviticus 4:1. That's a verse with 5 words, one of which is Moses. "GOD spoke to Moses, saying:"

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

The first verse of almost every chapter is dark, and has a little blue square around it. They are short verses, and Moses is referenced in almost every one of them! What's happening? The Book of Leviticus heavily focuses on a divine legal code: God speaks to Moses, who passes on the law.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

We have a few different codings here. Each (right aligned) line is a chapter of the book; each square is a verse. The first verse of each chapter are aligned along the right side. The color corresponds to verse length: short verses are dark; long verses bright.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

I've been enjoying tracking different patterns in the map. This is a fun one: we're looking at the word 'Moses' highlighted in blue. The backdrop is the Torahmap for the book of Leviticus, the third of the Five Books of Moses. torahmap.org?search=moses...

The Torahmap showing the book of leviticus. Each line is a chapter; each box is a verse. Long verses are bright, short verses are dim. Verses that mention Moses have a blue highlight. Virtually every verse that starts a chapter has the blue highlight.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

All this legal complexity is because they aren’t willing to make the act of taking a pill illegal. They want women to be unable to have an abortion, but not in a way that would cause a her (who is in their state) to go on trial for it. So they’re attempting to arrest out of state doctors.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

“This case arises from one of the most serious interstate aggressions in our Nation’s history.” That’s certainly a claim!

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The states of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama started their brief with “This case arises from one of the most serious interstate aggressions in our Nation’s history.” I can name another serious interstate aggressions in our nations history, and it wasn’t a complaint about mailing pills.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Wow, thanks! That means a lot to me!

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Excellent essay from Giorgia Lupi on the steps of craft -- and how AI *can* be used to support it. AI can be a powerful tool to accelerate some kinds of work -- but only with careful attention to what we lose each step of the way.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

That’s a crisis actor Smith hired to attend the game in Maryland to cover for the fact that he was at a game in Georgia.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I'd love if you had a chance to try it out -- torahmap.org. This project embodies hundreds of design decisions -- I'd love to know what you see!

torahmap.org

Torahmap

A Visual Concordance of the Hebrew Bible.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This work was directly inspired by Brad Paley's TextArc, and Keim& Oelke's (2007) Literature Fingerprinting, two works which have sat with me for years.

Brad Paley's TextArc places every sentence of a text -- in this case, Alice in Wonderland -- around a circle, and then words at their weighted center of those words, showing both frequency and location.

Keim & Oelke's "Literature Fingerprinting" (https://doi.org/10.1109/VAST.2007.4389004) shows different color patterns for texts

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Building with Agentic Coding has meant that I was able to iterate through bad ideas (so many bad ideas!) and failed approaches rapidly, and meant that I could afford to put some polish on a niche visualization that may have an extremely tiny audience.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The site tries to be usable on a phone, although high density visualization on a tiny screen is still not my favorite modality.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I built a 'storytelling' mode, with both an introductory tour and a set of hands-on stories that show off interesting aspects of the data. This is a useful feature when your users might not share all your domain knowledge!

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

One of my long-term questions was about what texts the Talmudic rabbis had ready-at-hand. Were they able to cite just anything, or were there some gaps in their knowledge? Painting a heatmap over the Torahmap shows that their knowledge was broad -- but there were favorites.

The Torahmap with a heatmap of reference from Talmudic texts: orange is many citations, blue is fewer; uncited texts are extremely faint. While the Five Books of Moses are most used, there is at least some coverage across the whole of the Tanakh.

The Torahmap with a heatmap of reference from Talmudic texts: orange is many citations, blue is fewer; uncited texts are extremely faint. This zooms in on the books of Exodus and Leviticus, showing more rabbinical citations of the legal code portions than narrative sections.

The Torahmap, showing the amount of Talmudic commentary over two books of the prophets. While nothing is as bright as the Five Books, there's at least *some* reference to many parts of both books.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The project starts with a base map. Consistent locations for every verse in the Tanakh. You can zoom and filter, but, like a cartographic map, location stays consistent.

A screenshot of the Torahmap project consisting of tiny squares in rows and columns. One block of squares for each book of the Tanakh, laying out the core cartography of the concept.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This was purely a passion project -- one that came of looking at reference books, and wanting to cross-reference sources, and deciding to take on the itch-scratching.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

I combined my love of #datavis with a different passion -- the rich text of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh. The Torahmap places every verse of the Tanakh in a fixed spatial position, then plots overlays over it. You can play with it at torahmap.org

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

For a decentralized, mostly-amateur sport featuring weekend warriors with mixed qualities of training, it’s a remarkably strong system of accident review and repair

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Does your methodology have a way to distinguish between the latter categories and the (presumably more real) election issues, such as the SAVE act / current USPS issues / redistricting fights/ voting booth closures? In other words, where does conspiracy end and genuine concern begin?

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

(The fact that this is more literally true with hundreds of species did ... not come to mind when I first heard it.)

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Somehow this reminds me of the old joke: "My grandfather was a lion hunter in Kansas." "Hey, there's no lions in Kansas!" "Not anymore there aren't."

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

In Alito's mind, the lawsuit filed early was premature; the lawsuit filed the *day after* the rule was issued was too late -- and it was too late because the rule *would* have been issued earlier, had the plaintiffs only not filed the first lawsuit.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The secret to immortality found: a ten percent increase in tree canopy cover.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

On? I recently stepped away from a client that was building a multiagent harness system because I realized I just didn’t have enough to add for them.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

On a recent project, my client was getting distracted by the high level of polish that the prototype created by default so I intentionally switched to toolkits with wiggly lines and desaturated colors

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

With? Absolutely. Amazing for rapid prototyping for exploratory work, putting together data collection scripts,…

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Don't we all sometimes wish our lives could be summarized as "loved to scuba dive and take acid." (I recognize her accomplishments were actually quite substantial, both in acting and in diving technology.) www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/a...

nytimes.com

Zale Parry, Aquatic Hollywood Star and Early Acid Tripper, Dies at 93

A diving feat landed her on the cover of Sports Illustrated and led to a film and TV career. She also took part in one of the first LSD studies.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Are you saying that the only way C-3PO learns about art is to be fed a copy of every copyrighted art in history? Is that your model of how humans learn about, or create, art?

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

At last, the Rob Reiner / Chris Nolan connection we’ve all been searching for.

A Venn diagram overlapping “the princess bride” and “inception” with a dream within a dream

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

Its almost as if real-world villains weren't cuddly and adorable!

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

And a better choice than OJ in the Naked Gun!

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

The Mongo scenes are much more uncomfortable to me today than the N-word scenes.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

fair -- this case and others like it are very much about how much we examine it. But @sunbirdie.bsky.social seems unaware that we don't, in fact, merely allow people to walk across the border, shout the word "asylum!", and then get a red carpet rolled out for them.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Is it your belief that we don't do that?

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

… and a handful of coroners, I suspect

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

The second amendment is ONLY a personal right to own guns. -the Supreme Court, probably

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Thank god they learned their lesson from the last time there was a massive uncontrolled viral outbreak shortly after chopping major international public health efforts. I for one think we should talk darkly about the ebola lab leak, and expect ebola herd immunity

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

- Folkloristics - Story structure - microeconomics - statistics - social media technologies as information systems (in 2000!) Fascinating exercise to look back at those!

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

… especially from a black guy

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

And it’s incredibly fun to go stand on top of them!

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

Proving that Poes Law predates the internet, I genuinely have no idea whether this letter is a ribbing or tongue in cheek pride.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

At Microsoft, we had three-stream waste disposal in the cafe from early days. Watching a candidate figure out how to clear their plate was (jokingly) “the after-lunch interview”

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

That one takes 80 more people (at the beginning) and a missing O

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

I’m worried about their solution: assume that tomorrow is largely the same as today, unless a human manually presses the “big news” button. It feels like their model isn’t able to see changes in the data itself.

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

I can only hope that there will be some fun class action lawsuits against companies that get refunds but don’t find a way to pass the money back

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

in four fours, two eights, or one contiuous burst? (I intuitively go with 10: 5 then 5)

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Danyel Fisher @danyelf.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

So a modern Name of the Rose?

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