Mandi L. Cai

Research CV Bylines Artwork & Creative projects

Hello! I am a 3rd year PhD student in Northwestern University's Technology and Social Behavior program, which is a joint program in computer science and communication. My interests include the communication of real‐time election results and election forecasts to the public, literacy + attitudes + opinions around data and AI, and digital tools that open up venues for participation in our governance. I am advised by Matthew Kay, as a member of the MU Collective, and my research is supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Before this, I was a designer and developer on the data visuals team at The Texas Tribune, reporting on issues affecting Texans through data analysis and visualizatons. Before that, I created dashboards for scientists at BioBright. Before that, I studied cognitive neuroscience and worked at a lab investigating human navigation and movement through virtual reality.

Feel free to reach out. Here's my CV if you're curious.

updates

April - May 2025 Going to CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan to support labmates and participate in the News Futures workshop. We submitted a paper detailing the methodological challenges we faced while conducting a live elections study during a real U.S. election, and the value of realism in journalism and visualization research.
March 2025 Served as a community reviewer for SRCCON's 2025 conference programming, at the intersection of technology and journalism 👩🏻‍💻
January 2025 Spoke about the value of AI for journalists, use cases of AI in journalism, and how to evaluate AI outputs at a Journalism & Women Symposium event in Chicago w/ Sachita Nishal.
June - February 2025 Designed, built, and ran our live elections study during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We surveyed hundreds of participants while they watched a live election results dashboard we built that visualized and displayed vote counts in real time, live-updating election forecasts, and information about how votes are counted.
May 2024 Went to CHI 2024 in Honolulu, Hawaii to present my accepted paper Watching the Election Sausage Get Made: How Data Journalists Visualize the Vote Counting Process in U.S. Elections and participate in a visualization literacy workshop co-organized by my lovely labmates. Would love to chat about all things uncertainty vis, data and statistical literacy, and elections :)
April 2024 Some of my wonderful colleagues and I attended CRA-WP's Grad Cohort for Women and Grad Cohort for IDEALS in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Also, found out that I received the NSF GRFP ...
October 2023 Was at SRCCON 2023 hosting a workshop w/ Tyler Fisher to explore alternative ways of presenting live election results, and the Journalism & Women Symposium CAMP 2023 discussing AI literacy for journalists on a panel w/ Sachita Nishal.
August 2023 Participated in the 2023-24 NU Design Cluster, a fellowship that brings together an interdisciplinary group of students and faculty to pursue design research.
April 2023 Sachita Nishal and I co-authored a workshop paper motivations, goals, and pathways for AI Literacy for journalists presented at the AI Literacy workshop at CHI 2023 in Hamburg, Germany :)

research

Watching the Election Sausage Get Made: How Data Journalists Visualize the Vote Counting Process in U.S. Elections

Mandi Cai and Matthew Kay

2024 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Honorable Mention Award

Swaying the Public? Impacts of Election Forecast Visualizations on Emotion, Trust, and Intention in the 2022 U.S. Midterms

Fumeng Yang, Mandi Cai, Chloe Mortenson, Hoda Fakhari, Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu, Jessica Hullman, Steven Franconeri, Nicholas Diakopoulos, Erik C. Nisbet, Matthew Kay

VIS 2023: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Best Paper Award

The Backstory to “Swaying the Public”: A Design Chronicle of Election Forecast Visualizations

Fumeng Yang, Mandi Cai, Chloe Mortenson, Hoda Fakhari, Ayse Deniz Lokmanoglu, Nicholas Diakopoulos, Erik C. Nisbet, Matthew Kay

VIS 2024: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

The Role of Data Journalists as Educators

Mandi Cai, Matthew Kay

Workshop: Toward a More Comprehensive Understanding of Visualization Literacy, 2024 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

Motivations, Goals, and Pathways for AI Literacy for Journalism

Mandi Cai*, Sachita Nishal*

Workshop: AI Literacy, 2023 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)

*Authors contributed equal work

bylines

From 2019 to 2022, I worked as a data journalist at The Texas Tribune, covering COVID-19's impact in Texas, tracking immigration numbers across the Texas-Mexico border, rebuilding a data explorer of government workers' salaries, among other topics. You can see a full list of my bylines here.

Texas Coronavirus Tracker
One Year of COVID-19
COVID-19 Social Distancing
Government Salaries Explorer
COVID-19 Economy Tracker
2020 Early Voting Tracker
2020 Voter Guide
Texas Mass Shootings Tracker
Tracking Migration at the Southwest Border

artwork & creative projects
Zest
Strangers Bench
In Transition

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