Grafoscopio

Grafoscopio Grafoscopio is a moldable and versatile tool for literate computing that allows one to mix prose, data, code, visualizations into interactive reproducible documents, raging from single notebooks to complete books.

Using Grafoscopio, Data Week is a recurrent workshop+hackathon, where participants learn how to use, adapt and modify Grafoscopio, to create their data narratives and custom agile visualization and to create and open their own reproducible publications. With these tools and practices, we are amplifying diverse voices about citizen concerns, crossing three themes: a) governance and autonomy, b) technology and information and c) power entanglements.

Some examples of what we have done with Grafoscopio are:

• Grafoscopio User Manual.
• Panama Papers as reproducible research.
• Data Driven Journalism Handbook (Spanish)
• Steps towards a Digital Library in Bogotá (Spanish).
• Analysis of the Colombian Public Code Portal (Spanish).

Pharo and its ecosystem, and the proactive and helpful communities around them, have been key in this experience, by providing a moldable base to create our own tools within a unified, extensible, interactive live coding and modeling environment, including the Roassal agile visualization engine and the GT Tools Thanks to those tools and communities, we are able to move in a pretty agile way and to have a leverage point where we can work with a unified metaphor to approach a diversity of themes (like those linked above) and tools, from documentation formats and publication (Pandoc, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, PDF, EPUB), to data modelling, retrieval, storage and serialization (JSON, STON, SQL, Fossil), to custom agile visualization.

Such simple and powerful immersive integrated environment, that is well connected with the external world and helps the community to create its own tools, have proven to be key in developing the new devices, literacies and practices, that a world, where the intertwine between digital technologies, citizenship and power plays an increasingly central role, is urgently needing.