Every year Big Brother contestants agree to be totally isolated from society for the duration of the season. This means they miss major news events.  On rare occasions producers break the cardinal rule and reveal really important information, like the September 11 attacks, the presidential election results, and the COVID-19 outbreak (which ramped up during […]

A closer look at the data behind Big Brother’s notorious live feeds outages

Interactive black history project shows how America’s love for black culture, but not black people, has erased African Americans’ role in pioneering American music.

From slave patrols to Jim Crow to the war on drugs, the history of police brutality in black America looks like a recurring nightmare.

Despite daily televised updates and frequent data dumps, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city of New York have been hesitant to publish neighborhood-level stats showing the impact of COVID-19 on the four boroughs. That is until yesterday afternoon, when the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene released zip-code level COVID-19 data via its Github […]

If it weren’t for the data viz and visual storytelling of the last decade, journalism might be dead. Shortly before the start of 2010 the future of journalism looked grim. Newspaper readership was shifting, ad revenue was tanking, and jobs were being cut. Several papers filed for bankruptcy, while newspaper stocks sank. The so-called Digital […]

After three uncomfortable experiences at Walgreens drugstores it’s time to think about racial profiling and when to draw a line.

In order to understand Big Brother’s track record with diversity and representation, I created a dataset containing demographic information for every contestant who’s been on the show. I visualized some of the major takeaways of my analysis and presented them in one massive blog post. Here I lay out the methodology, caveats and thought-process behind […]

I spent a year counting the times I experienced this age-old type of racial profiling

In celebration of Black History Month, here’s a look at the African-American innovators who paved the way for digital storytelling.