You will know you have created something incredible when other people are still thinking about it 16 years later. I am Other People, and I’ve been obsessed with the New York Times’ Olympic Musical graphic from the 2010 Winter Olympics, where Amanda Cox turned the gap in finishing times in event finals into sound. I’m that person

If you have ever opened the U.S. Census website looking for tract-level data, you know how quickly things can get overwhelming. Tables, codes, geographies, shapefiles, downloads: before you even ask a question, you are already having to decide which tools you need to answer it. Inspired by a video explainer by Kyle Walker, this  tutorial

If the only things you’re doing on bluesky are scrolling, liking and posting, then you are still riding a bike with training wheels. Hear me out. There are several simple and free tools out there that let you take advantage of bluesky’s secret weapon: its open-source skeleton. A how-to A few firehose ideas: First, you’re probably

One of the biggest challenges working with text data is the many different ways that people can enter the exact same information. A human knows that “St. Lucie, Florida,” “Saint Lucie, FL,” and “St Lucy, Florida” are probably all the same place, but a computer doesn’t. “Fuzzy” matching pulls similarities between the letters in words and

Many people think of R as a way to visualize data, but it can also be a useful tool to explore datasets and seek possible story ideas. At the 2023 Investigative Reporters and Editors conference, Charles Minshew, the digital storytelling editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, walked through using basic R code to question datasets. Knowing