Jenna Jordan
Data engineer in practice, data librarian at heart.
Knitter, dog momma, board gamer, and consumer of sci-fi/fantasy of all mediums.
Civic tech, data for good, peace/conflict data, and philosophizing thru data modeling
https://jennajordan.me
- "Ten simple rules for teaching data science": arxiv.org/abs/2602.02874 A new preprint by @minecr.bsky.social and myself. We'd love any feedback!
- I was thinking the other day that we really need a microtransaction service/system for all articles. I hesitate to get a monthly subscription for a paper/magazine when I just want to read one article and know I will forget to cancel, but I would not hesitate to pay a tiny amount for a single article
- In our family the tale of the spaghetti sauce sauce recipe is told every Christmas Eve, along with a re-count of how many years the spaghetti sauce has been made for Christmas Eve dinner (I forget exactly but ~70 years). We all got the recipe on tea towels for Christmas one year. It shall live on!
- Don't want to say this is the stupidest take ever but holy crap this is stupid. Your genes are just a random mess of chemicals, not some magic formula. I'm more worried about the huge amount of grandmas who will not pass on their spaghetti sauce recipe. At least some care and crafting went into that
- Excel continues its grand tradition of giving you ever more rope to hang yourself with… Ditto what this guy said 👇
- Celebrated Imbolc yesterday by making some candied oranges. Should be ready tonight to dip in chocolate (for those that held together) or coat with sugar (for the rest). My first attempt at candying fruit… I hope they are worth it!
- Reposted by Jenna Jordan"Teaching with AI is not without value; it is a case study in how even well-meaning educators operating in good faith can become inadvertent agents of a pedagogical de-skilling and institutional dehumanization." This scathing book review really is worth reading.
- One of the best AI critiques I’ve seen read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/...
- I currently have a blog post in my drafts tentatively titled “GenAI gives me the ick”, and this newsletter from @felienne.bsky.social is going to have to be linked to and quoted in it. www.felienne.nl/2026-02/#all... h/t @phdtoothfairy.bsky.social
- During this talk I gave one brief anecdote of a question asked of a reference librarian (“can birds fly?”) but a week too late I’ve stumbled across an even better one! “Oranges and peaches” livinginthelibraryworld.blogspot.com/2010/10/oran...
- A week ago I delivered my talk at @datadaytexas.bsky.social: "Think Like a Librarian: Fresh Perspectives from a Time-Honored Tradition". While my co-speaker Amalia Child couldn't make it due to the winter storm, I'm glad I was still able to present and bring a librarian's perspective to data folks.
- If you work in tech and want to read something valuable and important about agents, read Benn's latest. Hint: this isn't actually about AI agents, in the end. benn.substack.com/p/gas-town
- A week ago I delivered my talk at @datadaytexas.bsky.social: "Think Like a Librarian: Fresh Perspectives from a Time-Honored Tradition". While my co-speaker Amalia Child couldn't make it due to the winter storm, I'm glad I was still able to present and bring a librarian's perspective to data folks.
- A proper winter snow this weekend 🩵
- Reposted by Jenna JordanA Minneapolis knitting shop has resurrected the design of a Norwegian cap worn to protest Nazi occupation. Its owner says the money raised from hat pattern sales will support the local immigrant community. n.pr/4thWiUr
- The Open Visualization Academy (OVA) IS LIVE! openvisualizationacademy.org Thread follows #dataViz #infographics #dataJournalism #dataVisualization
- Reposted by Jenna Jordan1. The thing about science that these jokers don't understand is that science cannot be vibe-coded. Whatever its flaws, the point with vibe coding is that you're trying to quickly make something that sorta works, where you can immediately sorta see if it sorta works and then sorta use it.
- Abigail Haddad back with yet again another banger of a blog post that everyone who is still hanging on to STATA, SAS, SPSS, MATLAB, etc needs to read and internalize. Especially relevant for #civictech open.substack.com/pub/presento...
- Reposted by Jenna Jordan[Not loaded yet]
- Now, at last, the finale to the finale… the data town hall hosted by @joereis.bsky.social and Matthew Housley… time for some friendly debate!
- Last talk of the day before the town hall, Paul Blankley argues in “Agents are eating the semantic layer” that LLMs have graduated beyond needing semantic layers - let the LLM write the sql with the context that is captured by the semantic layer.
- My talk is done, phew! Next up is fellow North Carolinian Thais Cooke, talking about the human layer of data
- Last talk before mine… Shachar Meir is telling a room full of data professionals how they can become a $1M data professional
- I’m absolutely delighted to see @hannes.muehleisen.org talk for the first time in person. He is somehow using duckdb for his slides (of course), and talking about the joy of sql… if properly implemented.
- DDTX attendees are lucky to be able to hear the legendary Bill Inmon speak - today about how to fix how decidedly disappointing LLMs have been in producing business value with an LLM preprocessor.
- Conference knitting today is a honey cowl!
- Kicking off the first session of @datadaytexas.bsky.social is @juansequeda.bsky.social with his learnings from 20 years of building knowledge graphs and ontologies
- Reposted by Jenna JordanTrump has been in office for one year. We at @nature.com did a deep dive looking at the administration's disruption of science in numbers. Take a look—the numbers are staggering. By me, @dangaristo.bsky.social, Jeff Tollefson, @kimay.bsky.social, & help from @noamross.net @scott-delaney.bsky.social
- Pretty much the entirety of data & knowledge communities online right now:
- I finally found some brown beech mushrooms after striking out at multiple grocery stores and asian markets, which means tonight I cooked a new soup recipe I’ve had open in a tab for weeks: www.justonecookbook.com/kabocha-miso...
