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 informs data storytelling. Her article “Storytelling Wisdom: Story, information, and DIKW” theorizes storytelling as a fundamental information form. She leads the nationally-funded Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians project to equip libraries with narrative tools for data-informed advocacy, which has been used by over 1,000 librarians in over 50 countries so far. As of 2024, she had delivered over a dozen keynotes on her work to nonprofit organizations nationally and internationally and many more informal talks at for state and regional organizations. She won the ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award in 2022, and her book Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact is coming out in August 2025. 
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