Professor Kate McDowell’s interdisciplinary work examines how storytelling plays a vital role in humanizing data analysis and communication. She focuses on storytelling as information research and how the history of library storytelling can teach us about effective data storytelling. Her book is Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact (2025). Her open access article for information scholars, “Storytelling Wisdom: Story, information, and DIKW,” theorized story as a fundamental information form. She leads the nationally-funded Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians project (2021-present) to equip libraries with narrative tools for data-informed advocacy, which has been used by over 5,200 librarians in over 50 countries so far. As of 2025, she had delivered over forty invited talks and over a dozen keynotes on her work to nonprofit organizations nationally and internationally. Her work has been recognized by two global awards, the ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award in 2022 and the ASIS&T Research Impact Award in 2026.
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