Work Index

Cryptographic Amnesia

A cultural history of how codes and ciphers moved from the margins of everyday life to its infrastructure.

How Much Is a Verification Worth?

What is a single identity verification actually worth? A dollar figure, built up from Enigma's data.

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.

Anatomy of a Shell Company

What a shell company actually looks like, and how shared addresses, agents, and officers expose the networks behind them.

Can Business Data Predict March Madness?

Can the business fabric of a college town predict a March Madness winner? A test against recent tournament cities.

Wyoming's Corporate Boom

The state structures that make anonymous business ownership a paid feature.

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.

The Drug Testing Lab Industry

Regional variation, cannabis correlations, and fragmentation across the drug-testing lab industry.

When Compliance Is Skin Deep

How med spas use their business structure and registration to work around medical-practice rules.

Fonts

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.

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Filed Under Fiction

The implausible, unvalidated officer names that slip into official state business registrations.

OpenRoundup: Multi-Table Data Wrangling Through Interactive Visualization

An interactive take on multi-table data wrangling that continues the work begun in Table Scraps.

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Match Points: A Field Guide to Business Identity

How to read a business's identity beyond its state filings: address clusters, contact graphs, zombie entities, and sudden proliferation.

Lifecycles of Vice Merchants

How long businesses in the vice trades survive, compared across several categories.

The Geography of Corporate America

A jurisdictional map of where corporate America incorporates, and why.

Slice Slice Baby

What a viral pizza review is actually worth, traced through review scores, revenue, foot traffic, and geography.

The Michelin Effect

Revenue, geography, and star status, compared across more than 1,700 restaurants.

Spirits of Retail Past

How seasonal Halloween stores occupy and reuse the empty shells of former retail space.

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.

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Equipment for Living

Teaching photography, photogrammetry, and world-building as ways to think about memory, ritual, collaboration, and the ordinary business of living.

Fonts

Web typography at global scale, from font formats and delivery to variable fonts, icons, and how type actually renders.

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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.

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The Drawbridge Model of Cryptographic Communication

Cryptography as a drawbridge on the communications bridge: raising and lowering access without tearing the channel down.

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Dirty Data in the Newsroom: Comparing Data Preparation in Journalism and Data Science

An ethnography of how journalists and data scientists actually clean data.

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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.

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.

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The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography

The doctoral dissertation behind Cryptographic Amnesia, examining how cryptography acquired new cultural and political meanings in twentieth-century America.

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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.

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.

Modernizing Arabic Type for a Digital Audience

The design and engineering decisions behind bringing Arabic typography onto digital screens.

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.

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.

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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.

Scripting Cyrillic

The history and contemporary craft of designing type for the Cyrillic script.

Hot Type, Always Fresh

Foundry practice, display type, and the constant reinvention of typographic form.

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.

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Teaching Data and Computational Journalism

A national study of data-journalism teaching at 113 programs, with practical models for developing computational curricula.

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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.

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.

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.

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Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting

On Dietmar Elger's biography of the painter Gerhard Richter.

No Such Thing as Silence

On Kyle Gann's study of John Cage's silent composition 4'33".

GitHub, Current Account

Independent software, research tools, and experiments, kept as current public repositories.

GitHub, Earlier Account

Earlier repositories and research code from the Columbia and UBC years.

Iceberg Sensemaking

Iceberg Sensemaking, a model of the visible and hidden labor of working with complex data, laid out in the presentation slides.

The Drawbridge Model of Cryptographic Communication

Cryptographic communication as staged access, not a simple open-or-closed channel: a keynote on the Drawbridge Model.

Feminist Technoscience

Feminist approaches to science and technology, with attention to knowledge, power, institutions, and design, in a guest lecture.

Dirty Data in the Newsroom

How journalists recognize, repair, and reason through dirty data in newsroom investigations, from field research presented on video.

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.

If Communication Is a Bridge, Cryptography Is a Drawbridge

The Drawbridge Model as a way to understand selective access, secrecy, and trust in cryptographic communication.

Newsroom Sensemaking

How journalists make sense of data in practice, including the often invisible work of cleaning and interpretation.

Table Scraps

The hidden work of repairing, interpreting, and reshaping messy tables before they can be analyzed, presented on video.

Information, Entropy, and Play

Information theory, entropy, and play as three ways of understanding uncertainty, rules, and interpretation.

Two Varieties of Digital Utopianism

Two traditions of digital utopianism, and their competing ideas about technology, community, and social change.

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.

Teaching Data and Computational Journalism

What journalism programs actually teach about data and computation, drawing on the Teaching Data and Computational Journalism research.

Understanding SecureDrop

How news organizations adopt and use SecureDrop for anonymous sources, based on interviews and newsroom research.

The Techniques and Aesthetics of Phototypesetting

How phototypesetting changed both the techniques of composition and the visual possibilities of printed text, a history-of-technology talk.

Equipment for Living Student Archive

Student-built Unity worlds and essays, browsable together, showing how participants translated theory into collaborative digital environments.

Gender and Diversity in Engineering

How gender, diversity, and institutional power shape engineering practice and technological systems, taught as a graduate course.

Journalism Practices and Standards

Reporting standards, verification, ethics, sourcing, and the everyday routines that make journalism credible.

Investigative Journalism

Developing public-interest investigations through source building, document research, verification, and collaborative reporting.

Data Visualization

Designing and evaluating visual explanations of data, with attention to evidence, uncertainty, and public communication.

The Digital Newsroom

Reporting and publishing with digital tools inside a working newsroom, taught as a practice-based course.

ORCID 0000-0002-2796-6820

A persistent identifier that consolidates Charles's scholarly identity and publication record across institutions.

Google Scholar

Scholarly publications, co-authors, citation counts, and related research, aggregated into one citation profile.

SecureDrop Research

Freedom of the Press Foundation's research directory listing the Guide to SecureDrop among the project's official studies and resources.

Charles Berret, SIGGRAPH History Archives

An ACM SIGGRAPH person record linking Charles to Knowing Together and its Art Gallery exhibition history.

Lead Found in Whistler Tap Water

Global News reporting from the Tainted Water collaboration on lead found in Whistler tap water, with Charles credited as faculty supervisor.

UBC Journalism Students Investigate Tainted Tap Water

UBC's account of the Tainted Water investigation, its cross-newsroom collaboration, and Charles's role as faculty supervisor.

SIGGRAPH Showcase for Knowing Together

UBC reports on Knowing Together and its selection as a SIGGRAPH Art Gallery best-in-show finalist.

Charles Berret, UBC Journalism

A UBC profile covering research on cryptography and journalism, the Teaching Data and SecureDrop reports, and the courses taught there.

Charles Berret, Brown Institute

A Brown Institute fellow profile covering work on cryptography, journalism, and the Magic Grant-supported Web Transparency project.

New Curriculum Available for Data Journalism Programs

Tableau's account of how the Teaching Data report informed a new curriculum.

Guide to SecureDrop, Report Launch

Two Tow Center announcements for the Guide to SecureDrop: the public launch event and an introduction to the report's findings.

SecureDrop Use Is Growing in Newsrooms

Nieman Lab reports on the Guide to SecureDrop and its findings about newsroom adoption.

Charles Berret, Tow Center

A Tow Center fellow profile documenting research on information systems and the fellowship behind the Guide to SecureDrop.

Brown at ITP Summer Camp

A Brown Institute program record of a summer workshop at ITP and the fellows who took part.

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.

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.

WASP-HS Research Support

Research support from WASP-HS for work on cryptographic communication and the Drawbridge Model.

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.

Tow Center Research Fellowship

A Tow Center fellowship supporting research on information systems and the newsroom practices documented in the Guide to SecureDrop.

Magic Grant

A Magic Grant to the De-Glass research team, whose work investigated the technologies and commercial relationships embedded in web pages.