2026-present
Kettle
Kettle is a file review desk for tighter coordination of agentic co-working projects. Read and approve a batch of files, then Kettle curates the next batch.
[ public record ]
Work Index
A growing public record of projects, publications, software, talks, teaching, profiles, press, awards, and support. Major work receives a full project record. The rest remains findable through original synopses and labeled sources.
Projects
[ 9 full records ]2025-26
Enigma Content Pipeline
I built an agentic research pipeline for data journalism: queries, entity resolution, analysis notebooks, and bulletproof verification leading to published investigations.
How Much Is a Verification Worth? ↗ Read an investigation estimating the economic value of a single identity verification from Enigma data. How to Sue a Company That Doesn't Even Exist ↗ Read an investigation of mass-defendant lawsuits against businesses that appear not to exist. Anatomy of a Shell Company ↗ Read an investigation of the addresses, agents, and officers that reveal shell-company networks. Wyoming's Corporate Boom ↗ Read an investigation of the state structures that make anonymous business ownership a paid feature. No Branches, No Verification, No Problem ↗ Read an investigation of a Colorado licensing carve-out and crypto-named money-service businesses. The Geography of Corporate America ↗ Read a data-driven map of where American companies incorporate and why those jurisdictions attract them.
2022-25
Iceberg Sensemaking
A process model, written with Tamara Munzner, for the below-the-waterline schemas and judgment that shape any data analysis, kept separate from the newsroom papers Charles co-authored as an academic advisor.
forthcoming
Cryptographic Amnesia
A cultural history of cryptography that follows codes and ciphers from specialized instruments into the infrastructure of everyday communication.
Overview ↗ Read the publication synopsis, status, and bibliographic record for the forthcoming book. Drawbridge Model preprint ↗ Read a related preprint on how cryptographic tools move between civilian and military uses. Dissertation excerpts ↗ Selected dissertation passages that form the book's archival research foundation.
2025-26
Content Engineering
The software side of an agentic research desk: reusable skills, entity resolution, and multi-model evaluation that supported data-journalism investigations.
2018-19
Knowing Together
A collaborative photogrammetry project in which the seams and distortions of a 3D image record how a group tried to see together.
Project site ↗ Explore the collaborative photogrammetry project through images, process notes, and an interactive presentation. SIGGRAPH Art Gallery catalog entry ↗ Open the illustrated catalog paper presented with the project in the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. SIGGRAPH paper DOI ↗ Open the persistent publication record and citation details for the SIGGRAPH paper. The Lifespan of Ephemera ↗ Read a later essay on preservation, disappearance, and the project's changing digital afterlife. Read as plaintext Open a local plain-text reading copy of the full written piece.
Spring 2025
Equipment for Living
A ten-week School for Poetic Computation course about making media as a way to think through memory, ritual, collaboration, and everyday life.
Course ↗ Read the School for Poetic Computation course overview, themes, schedule, and instructor information. Teaching essay ↗ Read Charles and Rosalie Yu's account of the ideas and teaching methods behind the course. Student work ↗ Browse projects made by students during the course, with images and individual project notes.
2015-16
Guide to SecureDrop
The first published study of how SecureDrop entered newsroom routines and changed the practical conditions of protecting anonymous sources.
Guide to SecureDrop ↗ Open the complete Tow Center report on how newsrooms adopted and operated SecureDrop. Columbia Journalism Review ↗ Read the report's web edition and overview at Columbia Journalism Review. Academic Commons record ↗ Open Columbia's repository record for publication metadata, citation, and downloadable files. SecureDrop research ↗ Browse the SecureDrop project's research library, including this study and later related work. Read as plaintext Open a local plain-text reading copy of the full written piece.
2014-26
Typography and the Web
Research and writing on type as both cultural form and technical infrastructure, from the history of Impact to web fonts measured across millions of sites.
Web Almanac Fonts 2025 ↗ Read the 2025 analysis of web-font formats, loading behavior, variable fonts, and typography trends. Web Almanac Fonts 2024 ↗ Read the 2024 data chapter on how fonts are selected, delivered, and rendered across the web. Impact, the meme font ↗ Open the full Journal of Visual Culture article on Impact's history and use in image macros. Impact article DOI ↗ Open the persistent publication record and citation details for the Impact article. Choosing Web Fonts ↗ Read a practical Google Design guide to evaluating and choosing typefaces for web projects.
Writing and Publications
[ 42 records ]forthcoming
Cryptographic Amnesia
A cultural history of how codes and ciphers moved from the margins of everyday life to its infrastructure.
2026
How Much Is a Verification Worth?
What is a single identity verification actually worth? A dollar figure, built up from Enigma's data.
2026
How to Sue a Company That Doesn't Even Exist
Surfaced 8,747 federal mass-defendant cases from the RECAP archive to show how mass-litigation targets businesses that don't really exist.
2026
Anatomy of a Shell Company
What a shell company actually looks like, and how shared addresses, agents, and officers expose the networks behind them.
2026
Can Business Data Predict March Madness?
A cheeky twist on the 'bracketology' of sports prediction.
2026
Wyoming's Corporate Boom
The state structures that make anonymous business ownership a paid feature.
2026
No Branches, No Verification, No Problem
How a Colorado licensing carve-out concentrated more than half of all crypto-named money-service-business registrants in a single state.
2026
The Drug Testing Lab Industry
Regional variation, correlations, and fragmentation across the drug-testing lab industry.
2026
When Compliance Is Skin Deep
How med spas use their business structure and registration to work around medical-practice rules.
2025
Web Almanac: Fonts (2025)
How the web actually uses type, measured across millions of sites: what fonts get loaded, in what formats, and at what cost to the page.
2026
Filed Under Fiction
The implausible, unvalidated officer names that slip into official state business registrations.
2026
OpenRoundup: Multi-Table Data Wrangling Through Interactive Visualization
An interactive take on multi-table data wrangling that continues the work begun in Table Scraps.
2025
Match Points: A Field Guide to Business Identity
How to read the identity of a business beyond its state filings: address clusters, contact graphs, zombie entities, and sudden proliferation.
2025
Lifecycles of Vice Merchants
How long businesses in the vice trades survive, compared across several categories.
2025
The Geography of Corporate America
A jurisdictional map of where corporate America incorporates, and why.
2025
Slice Slice Baby
What a viral pizza review is actually worth, traced through review scores, revenue, foot traffic, and geography.
2025
The Michelin Effect
Revenue, geography, and star status, compared across more than 1,700 restaurants.
2025
Spirits of Retail Past
How seasonal Halloween stores occupy and reuse the empty shells of former retail space.
2025
Iceberg Sensemaking: A Process Model for Critical Data Analysis and Visualization
A process model for the hidden, below-the-waterline work of critical data analysis, reframed through an interpretivist lens.
2025
Equipment for Living
Teaching photography, photogrammetry, and world-building as ways to think about memory, ritual, collaboration, and the ordinary business of living.
2024
Web Almanac: Fonts (2024)
Web typography at global scale, from font formats and delivery to variable fonts, icons, and how type actually renders.
2024
The Lifespan of Ephemera: Reflections on Collaborative Art and the Embodiment of Data
A look back at Knowing Together, and what a digital model can and cannot preserve of an embodied, collaborative experience.
2024
The Drawbridge Model of Cryptographic Communication
Cryptography as a drawbridge mediating communications: raising and lowering access without tearing the channel down.
2023
Dirty Data in the Newsroom: Comparing Data Preparation in Journalism and Data Science
An ethnography of how journalists and data scientists actually clean data.
2020
Table Scraps: An Actionable Framework for Multi-Table Data Wrangling from an Artifact Study of Computational Journalism
A framework for wrangling data spread across many tables, built from an artifact study of computational-journalism notebooks and pipelines.
2019
Knowing Together: An Experiment in Collaborative Photogrammetry
A collaborative photogrammetry experiment that preserved distortion as evidence of the people and process behind a 3D image.
2019
The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography
The doctoral dissertation behind Cryptographic Amnesia, examining how cryptography acquired new cultural and political meanings in twentieth-century America.
2018
Choosing Web Fonts: A Beginner's Guide
A beginner's guide that chooses a web font the right way round, starting from the content, its readers, the languages it has to cover, and what the browser has to do to render it.
2018
The New Wave of Indian Type
The designers remaking Indian type for a moment when scripts, technologies, and reading habits are all changing at once.
2018
Modernizing Arabic Type for a Digital Audience
The design and engineering decisions behind bringing Arabic typography onto digital screens.
2017
The Android Developer's Guide to Better Typography
A technical guide by Rod Sheeter to using downloadable fonts and making more deliberate typographic choices in Android applications.
2017
Walter Benjamin and the Question of Print in Media History
Reads Benjamin’s theory of print as a media history problem: how a technology of reproduction reshapes what counts as culture.
2017
Newsrooms Are Making Leaking Easier, and More Secure, Than Ever
How SecureDrop-era tooling made leaking easier for sources and safer for newsrooms, without trading one for the other.
2017
Scripting Cyrillic
The history and contemporary craft of designing type for the Cyrillic script.
2017
Hot Type, Always Fresh
Foundry practice, display type, and the constant reinvention of typographic form.
2016
Guide to SecureDrop: An Emerging Platform for Secure and Anonymous Communication in Newsrooms
The first published study of how newsrooms adopted SecureDrop for secure communication with anonymous sources.
2016
Teaching Data and Computational Journalism
A national study of data-journalism teaching at 113 programs, with practical models for developing computational curricula.
2016
A Crucial Skill That Most J-Schools Aren't Teaching
Why journalism schools need computational literacy, not as a specialty, but as a core skill for reporting in a data-shaped world.
2014
A Brief Introduction to Impact: 'The Meme Font'
A cultural history of Impact, the typeface that became the definitive look of the image macro and the internet meme.
2014
Sensors and Sensibilia: A Historical Survey
A history of sensing technology, and how measurement devices changed what a journalist can observe in the first place.
2010
Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting
On Dietmar Elger's biography of the painter Gerhard Richter.
2010
Software and Project Sites
[ 5 records ]current
Capture
Text, voice, images, and PDFs go in; plain Markdown notes come out, all handled locally on your own machine.
current
archival
2026-03-26
Enigma Government Archive
Thousands of government datasets and billions of records, gathered into Enigma's Government Archive; led the writing and content strategy for the launch.
2019
Knowing Together
Thirty-five people made shared 3D images together in a collaborative photogrammetry experiment; this is its project site.
Talks and Media
[ 16 records ]2025-11-07
2024-12-18
Metis and the Hacker
Metis, cunning intelligence, and the cultural history of hacking, worked through in conversation.
2024
2024
2023
2023
Scholarly Research in Plaintext
Plain-text formats and lightweight tools that make scholarly research more durable, portable, and reproducible, taught as a hands-on workshop.
2022
2021
2020
2020
2019-03-26
Data, Visualization, the Press, and Public Opinion
Data journalism and visualization, and the institutions that turn them into public knowledge: a public lecture.
2019
2017
Collecting Randomness for the Vernam System
A history-of-technology talk on where the Vernam cipher got its randomness, and what it took to turn noise into a working key.
2016
2015
2012
Teaching
[ 7 records ]Spring 2025
Equipment for Living
Media theory meets photography, 3D scanning, and Unity world-building over ten weeks.
2025
2023
2020
2018-20
2018-19
2018
Press, Profiles, and Citations
[ 17 records ]current
current
current
archival
2019-12-16
2019-11-01
2019-07-31
2018-09-13
2017-18
2017-03
Record: New Curriculum Available for Data Journalism Programs
Tableau's account of how the Teaching Data report informed a new curriculum.
2016-12-06
Interview: Uses This
Research tools, archives, Markdown, open systems, and the practical work behind SecureDrop and data journalism, covered in a long interview.
2016-06-02
2016-05-13
2015-16
2014-15
Record: Web Transparency and SearchLight
A Brown Institute project into the technologies and commercial relationships embedded in web pages.
2014-06-03
2014-05-06
Record: Stanford and Columbia Announce Magic Grants
Stanford's announcement of the 2014 Magic Grants, including the team behind De-Glass and the project that became Web Transparency and SearchLight.
Awards and Support
[ 6 records ]2023
Record: Best Paper Honorable Mention
Honorable mention for Dirty Data in the Newsroom, led by Stephen Kasica with co-authors Charles Berret and Tamara Munzner. Charles's role was academic advisor and co-author on the doctoral research, not sole or lead authorship.
2022-24
2020-05-30
Record: CAJ Data Journalism Award
Tainted Water, by the Institute for Investigative Journalism and its media partners, received the 2019 Canadian Association of Journalists Data Journalism Award, announced in 2020.
2019
Record: SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Best-in-Show Finalist
Knowing Together was selected as a best-in-show finalist for the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, recognizing its collaborative photogrammetry installation.
2015-16
2014-15