✏️ Dearest data fam

Aaannnd yet another September has come and gone, and with it, the warm, exciting memories of first-day-of-school trepidations: Who will my teachers be? Will my friends be in our class? What subjects will I learn about?

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Domestic Data Streamers
September 30, 2025

OK, yes, maybe we were just nerds, but sometimes September still feels like the start of something new, the occasion to pick up a new hobby, to start a new class, to meet new people - a moment of first encounters. Now, doesn't that sound like the perfect theme for this month’s newsletter?

“Hello from the children of planet Earth”. Just one of the possible 55 greetings extraterrestrial life forms might hear if they encounter one of the Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977 - listen to all of them here! Still doesn’t mean an Arrival-like situation can’t happen…

Two people meet, fall in love, spend a few years together, break up and never speak again. A tale as old as time - such that only two converging, then diverging lines can tell it, one of the “closeness lines over time”, drawn by cartoonist Olivia de Recat. We must admit that the dog one also broke our heart.

On a quaint day in the summer of 1788, white sails appeared in what would later be known as Sydney Cove - the first contact between Aboriginal Eora people and European colonisers. In this article story, Gadigal Elder Allen Madden discusses first contact, the current situation of his community, and how he would’ve responded to the settlers arriving: “Go home! Go home!’

(The opening intro from Ninja Hattori - one of our staples…)

What was your first encounter with music - a nursery rhyme, or Tokio Hotel? If you want to know ours, we compiled everyone on the team’s first musical memory in the playlist here, just for your own listening pleasure. 

If the question sounds familiar, you’re on to something - it was the key question of the “Forever Frequencies” installation we did for the Barbican Museum in London, catch the case study here. 

Haven’t we all seen this graph tracing the evolution of how heterosexual couples have met, from 1940 to 2017? Actually, there are so many versions of this chart - same data set, different design - that some people from Quesma decided to analyze (almost) all of them. A great reflection on data viz.

And that’s it for now! (yes, maybe we should improve our send-off catchphrase, open to suggestions.) If this was your first encounter with our newsletter, hope it was a good one - and in any case, looking forward to the next one! 

From those who seek to build stories of great might-

For they believe in love for data at first sight.

Thanks for making it all the way to the end!