Professor Kate McDowell’s interdisciplinary work at the University of Illinois 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 2025 book for libraries,
Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact is an engaged expansion of her article theorizing story as a fundamental information form, “
Storytelling Wisdom: Story, information, and DIKW.” 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 5,200 librarians in over 50 countries so far. As of 2025, she had delivered over forty invited talks and over a dozen keynotes on her work to nonprofit organizations nationally and internationally. She won the ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award in 2022.
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