Writing & Investigations

Cryptographic Amnesia

Code, Power, and the Algorithmic Mediation of Everyday Life

Cryptographic Amnesia is a cultural history of how codes and ciphers moved from the margins of everyday life to its infrastructure. Rather than treating cryptography as a sequence of technical breakthroughs or instruments of war, the book follows its civilian uses and meanings across the twentieth century: as a way to protect secrets, verify identity, conduct commerce, resist surveillance, and organize political life. Based on archival research, long-form interviews, and public records, it asks how a technical practice came to carry such broad claims about freedom, trust, and power. The result is a people's history of cryptography and a newly usable past for anyone who relies on encryption today.

How Much Is a Verification Worth?

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

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.

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Anatomy of a Shell Company

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

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.

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Wyoming's Corporate Boom

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

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.

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

The Drug Testing Lab Industry

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

When Compliance Is Skin Deep

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Filed Under Fiction

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Lifecycles of Vice Merchants

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

The Geography of Corporate America

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Slice Slice Baby

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

The Michelin Effect

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Spirits of Retail Past

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

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

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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Lead author: Stephen Kasica. Charles co-authored as academic advisor on the doctoral research; these are not sole or primary publications of his.

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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With Tamara Munzner. Related newsroom data papers led by Stephen Kasica are listed separately under advisor co-authorship.

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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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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Lead author: Stephen Kasica. Charles co-authored as academic advisor on the doctoral research; these are not sole or primary publications of his.

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.

Lead author: Stephen Kasica. Charles co-authored as academic advisor on the doctoral research; these are not sole or primary publications of his.

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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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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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.

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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Fonts

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

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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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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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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.

Edited by Charles Berret. Written by Rod Sheeter.

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.

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.

Published under Enigma’s institutional byline. Part of the agentic data-journalism research pipeline described under Projects → Data Journalism.

Equipment for Living

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

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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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.

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.

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".

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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The on-site file contains selected excerpts.