Hi. I'm a technologist + journalist + word/bird fan + human. You'll find some more details about me and stuff I've worked on below, but of course you're not going to get a complete picture. Please feel free to just get in touch!
Keybase - Send me an encrypted message, or see that other accounts are verifiably linked to this identity.
Twitter - Although I've been on the site since middle school (!), I don't tweet very often. My DMs are open.
GitHub - Some code I've written is here! Some I've written (especially for class or work) is not.
LinkedIn - This communicates my educational and work experiences pretty effectively. My resume sums up much of it too. Okay, so my LinkedIn and resume are several months out of date. I'll update them soon, but I have been prioritizing other things. Also, I've opted to spell "resume" without any accents, but I did use an i with two dots over it somewhere on this page, if you're into that sort of thing.
MuckRock - Really trying to get on that FOIA Friday grind!
read - I've been trying to keep track of what I read online, and you are welcome to take a peek. The technical setup here is lots of fun too: bookmarklets, a teesny Glitch server, using D3 for templating, etc. I'll write more about this in the future.
blog - There is a blog here. It's pretty empty.
vere - A tiny podcast diary I made to (sort of) document the end of college.
roar - ? 🦁 ? 🌊 ?
ends - Pure silliness, feat. LCD Soundsystem. (I'm not even that big of an LCD Soundsystem fan, and I'm also not sure why I feel the need to provide that caveat.)
word - Find words that match patterns (probably good for cheating on crosswords).
What appears here is definitely not comprehensive. In roughly reverse chronological order:
Projects at the Seattle Times - I worked on various aspects of a numbers of stories as the interactives intern at the Seattle Times, including these:
—and a few others, some of which I'll add after they run. And also this Chrome extension to download Wordpress drafts as Markdown.
Call Collect - A tool I built for my master's thesis that helps journalists gather audio by making it easy for them to create call-in lines and web widgets where listeners can record their responses to prompts. This started as a project I built with an incredible team of radio producers and technologists at the wonderful Come and Play audio hackathon. I plan to revisit this project soon, but if you want to try it out, these interactive instructions are pretty comprehensive. I'd love your feedback.
so fetch! - A tiny module that proxies fetch requests through a Glitch server and naïvely adds CORS headers so you can easily load data into Observable notebooks. I was surprised and excited when I made this, because I thought I might have been the first person to make a Mean Girls reference in relation to the JavaScript fetch API, but I was wrong about that.
Twarc - A super simple service anyone can use to archive a Twitter user's timeline in about 5 seconds (no code to write, no API key necessary, just enter a simple URL). Made in Glitch, and designed/documented for remixing. I wrote a bit more on it here.
Palo Alto evaluating regulations to improve safety of seismically vulnerable buildings - I wrote about the risks some buildings in Palo Alto could face in an earthquake and some of the steps the city is considering taking to improve safety.
Nonprofit Explorer - As a news application fellow during summer 2017, I made some significant updates to this news application, one of ProPublica's most popular. (It helps you research nonprofit organizations, primarily by making their Form 990 IRS filings easy to browse). I made millions of filings that the IRS had recently released in XML format accessible in the app (in the raw machine-readable format and also styled by XSLT into more human-friendly versions). I wrote a blog post going into that work in some more detail. I also added PDFs of audits for some organizations to the app, restyled it to better match ProPublica's more recent news applications, and did other maintenance. I learned a lot about Ruby and Rails! And got to practice writing SQL + doing data spot-checking and analysis with csvkit and other command line tools.
Documenting Hate News Index - Did a small amount of work on this news application while I was at ProPublica (just a bit: you can see my name is really small at the bottom). Basically just maintaining it briefly and debugging some issues with the data pipeline; it was a good experience working with some bits of Google Cloud Platform and collaborating with Google News Lab.
Data is the new - I made this little Twitter bot that searches Twitter for "data is the new _" and it tells you how people are filling in that blank. "Data is the new oil" is popular, but I find "data is the new asbestos" a bit more interesting. Here's the code on Glitch, and more on the backstory.
Essays on Taylor Swift et al. - For a creative writing tutorial, I wrote a series of personal essays ostensibly about Taylor Swift, though they are also about a bunch of stuff that is not Taylor Swift. 🤷♀️ These are unpublished but I'd like to revisit them, and if you'd ever like to talk about them, I would probably be happy to.
Toast and Tea - A project I worked on with friends at Codex Hackathon 2017: It's a Chrome extension that inserts poetry into your Facebook news feed.
New Yorker Department Browser - Another project I worked on at Codex Hackathon 2017: Mainly, I scraped a dataset of all New Yorker magazine articles from the last 10 years or so with their authors and "departments" (which are the funnest thing in the world, because, you know, they usually aren't real departments as most of us think of the term). And then I made this pretty unsatisfying visualization, which I hope to improve when I have some time. I'd also love to combine gender analysis of author names (see below) to see who writes for which departments.
Breaking News Consumer Handbook Bot - Inspired by On the Media and Paul Ford, I made a little Twitter bot that tweets out the invaluable Breaking News Consumer's Handbooks. Most of the effort was data wrangling, and it doesn't work super robustly since it's deployed on Glitch, which is a gorgeous, fun platform that I was delighted to play with but is not particularly suited to production (the bot sleeps a lot). Maybe I'll redeploy it somewhere more appropriate at some point. But yay for media literacy!
Patterns in the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Fiction and Poetry - A wee visualization comparing nominees and winners of these prizes.
Visualizing Literary Influence in the Paris Review Interviews - A visualization tool for exploring the connections between some of modernity's greatest makers of literature. Check out the accompanying paper I wrote too.
Too Many Slacks - A tool for making deep links to Slack teams for your iOS homescreen.
Scroll percentage widget - A tiny Chrome extension I made for myself so I could see how far down a webpage I had scrolled. Is this really a good idea for my attention span/mental wellbeing? I don't know! It's in the Chrome Web Store though.
"Time Searcher" - My first major exploration with D3.js. I can't take any credit for the design here; the details of the class assignment this was built for are linked through from the app itself.
Bikopticon - A slightly rushed final project for my computational journalism class that allows you to explore bike counter data from around Seattle in a maybe not super user-friendly way. I loved working with the Dark Sky API though—it's awesome! And using Surge and Frozen Flask too.
Detecting Deceptive Opinion Spam - Final research paper on a text classification project for my natural language understanding class.
King County food inspections - A tool to quickly browse restaurant inspections in the Seattle area, made for my computational journalism class.
"Automated Gender Analysis of New Yorker Bylines" - An analysis of the gender breakdown of bylines from The New Yorker, my final project for "Computational Methods in the Civic Sphere." Did some fun web scraping and plotting. I still want to expand on this to look at particular sections!