With the launching of 538, Vox and the New York Times’ Upshot, it seems like the age of data journalism is finally here, greeted with both acclaim and concern by media critics. But data journalism is ...

Back in 2009, Aaron Bycoffe inspired Joe Germuska to write a thirty-line Python script called csvcut for making it easy to select a subset of columns from a CSV file. For the next two years the two of ...

Ultimately, I think the graphic produced by the Times did an excellent job of reminding readers about the human costs of the violence. By making the focus of the chart a single day of violence, we ...

Back in May of this year, I set myself a challenge: I wanted to try as many applications and libraries and programming languages in the field of data visualization as possible. To compare these tools ...

The New York Times’ astonishing Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, launched in the final days of 2012, capped a year of extraordinary work in interactive journalism, both at the Times and in ...

I convert a ton of text documents like PDFs to spreadsheets. It’s tedious and expensive work. So every time a new iteration of AI technology arrives, I wonder if it’s capable of doing what so many ...

The Data Last year I spent a long time on a project, more than 6 months. It was a 10-chapter 17,000 word immersive project at The Wall Street Journal. I was the visual editor for Trials, a story about ...

The raster, a 4,358px by 5,194px GeoTIFF exported directly from QGIS, simply didn’t have sufficient resolution to provide for sharpness at higher zooms — a limitation that was emphasized by the highly ...

In both of these examples, the first image is based on the same projection as that upper left corner map in my first example, called a Mercator projection. Frankly, for Hawaii, it’s not a terrible ...

Data Visualization and Journalism The word “visualization” once more readily described the act of creating a mental image in one’s mind, whereas today it’s far more likely to mean the graphical ...

The Tech Stack We believe in open source technology and try to use it as much as possible. We used Apache Solr for the indexing and Apache Tika for document processing, and it’s great because it ...

Left: Bird Migration in the Americas, supplement to the August 1979 National Geographic Magazine. Right: How Birds Migrate, supplement to the March 2018 National Geographic Magazine. Not shown, the ...