Data by Design: Visualization and Power from Abolition to the Dawn of Data Science is a forthcoming book from MIT Press by Professor Lauren Klein. From maps of colonial empires to charts of national trade, data visualization has long been used to consolidate knowledge and power. But just as often, it has been used to uncover oppression and bring about change. ECDS software engineers Jay Varner and Yang Li have been working with team that has included outside designers and Emory graduate students Margy Adams to develop a digital companion to the book, offering interactive visualizations, archival materials, and expanded research that brings these stories to life beyond the printed page.
In 2025, ECDS hosted weeklong work sessions when the team would collaborate in person. These sessions led to the site being released for public peer review.
This year, Dr. Bailey Betik collaborated with Stefano Maranzana and Simona Muratore to develop Mosaico Italiano, an interactive online Italian language textbook designed for the digital classroom. Built on WordPress, the platform features scaffolded modules of audio and visual exercises, drag-and-drop vocabulary activities, and integrated quizzes, as well as a hover translation effect on certain reading passages.
Emory University Music Professor Maho Ishiguro collaborated with ECDS to create an abridged translation of A History of Gambyong: Folk Arts to Classical Dance and host it on ECDS’s Manifold platform. Beyond the translation itself, the digital edition enriches the text with 45 videos of traditional dance and a selection of high-quality professional photographs of the dancers. In producing this edition, Senior Video Producer Steve Bransford assisted with editing the dance videos, and Senior Software Engineer Yang Li led the design of the book’s layout, aesthetics, and final ePub compilation. The project went through several rounds of close editorial review before reaching its final form, and stands as another example of how Manifold and the partnership between faculty and ECDS can yield high-quality enhanced editions of print-based, multilingual monographs.
Emory University Professor Kylie Smith was among the first faculty members to express interest in Manifold publishing when ECDS adopted the platform. She has since worked closely with the Center on her open-access publication, Jim Crow in the Asylum: Psychiatry and Civil Rights in the American South. The digital edition not only reproduces the print text but also incorporates interactive data visualizations built in Tableau Public and StoryMaps created in ArcGIS, two digital formats that enhances readers’ contextual understanding of the data and arguments presented in the book. Senior Software Engineer Yang Li provided guidance on the visual design of the book and led development of the Tableau dashboard, translating statistics into interactive, filterable visualizations. GIS Librarian Megan Slemons led the creation of ArcGIS StoryMaps, which uses web-based storytelling to illuminate specific topics explored in the work.
The Manifold edition of Underbelly is a Spanish-language translation of the original book by Professor Rachel Hall-Clifford, a medical anthropologist at Emory. Her book was published open access by MIT Press last year, and she was interested in producing a Spanish-language edition that would be accessible to the communities of healthcare workers and health policy professionals she works with in Central America. MIT agreed to grant us the rights to produce and release a Spanish-language translation on Manifold. Manifold offered a straightforward pathway for her to host the translation, which was produced through ECDS and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. This process has since inspired other Emory University faculty to pursue the release of translations of their scholarship through a similar workflow.
