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Population Mountains
This is a story about how to perceive the population size of cities.
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Human Terrain
Visualizing the World’s Population, in 3D.
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The Most Emo Lyrics: Emo Rap vs. Dashboard Confessional
Who has the most emotionally vulnerable lyrics, emo rappers or Dashboard Confessional? Has Juice Wrld out-emo’d emo bands?
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What Airport Traffic Tells Us About the World's Megacities
Last year, Daniel Knowles wrote an account of Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a city of 13 million people. One of his stats led me down a rabbit hole: Kinshasa has 13 departing flights per day.
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The Cultural Borders of Songs
We mapped last month’s #1 songs in 3,000 places. See where songs dominate across the globe.
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Are Hit Songs Becoming Less Musically Diverse?
Data on whether today’s hit artists are taking fewer risks and creating a narrower range of sounds.
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The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy
The genius of Ali Wong’s Netflix special.
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Mapping Gastronomic Borders in the US
How US culture dictates geographic restaurant patterns
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What is a Superteam in the NBA?
You Define It.
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Newspapers: A Black & White Issue
Measuring racial diversity in journalism.
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The Words That Are “Most Hip Hop”
Using math to rank words that are central to artists’ vocabularies.
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Analyzing Plot Trends for Every Top-Grossing Film from the Past 50 Years
This is a story about how film plots mirror (or shape) historical events.
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The Most Timeless NBA Plays
Historic NBA games and plays, ranked by YouTube views.
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Why Does the US Lead the World in Incarceration?
How we got here – the global leader in incarceration – is one of the most debated questions in policy.
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Do NBA Refs Favor the Home Team?
Analyzing 13,658 reviewed calls by the NBA to rank teams by favorable home court officiating.
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The Geographic Divide of Oscars Films
Mapping the popularity of Oscar-nominated films in 2017.
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The Emergence Of Slang, Using Search Data
Emerging slang, identified by searches for words’ definitions.
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Mapping Slavery Against US Incarceration
How do historic incarceration rates differ between slave states and non-slave states?
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How Robert Glasper sampled Miles Davis on “Ghetto Walkin”
An interactive story about the art of sampling.
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The 2,452 Wikipedia Pages on which Miles Davis is Mentioned
25 years after his death, he's still synonymous with Jazz, but you can find his fingerprints on so many other ideas.
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How Music Taste Evolved
Every top 5 song, from 1958 - 2016, so we can stop arguing about when music was still good.
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Using Historical NBA Data To Rank the Most Unlikely Comebacks
Using a win-probability model to identify the most statistically unlikely comebacks this season.
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The Largest Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender, Ever
From 2,000 screeplays, broken down by age and gender.
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Crowdsourcing the Definition of “Punk”
Looking at playlists to learn how parts of culture perceive genres and the bands who represent them.
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Hollywood's Gender Divide and its Effect on Films
The writers, directors, and producers who make films that fail the Bechdel test.
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The Most Succesful Labels in Hip Hop
Every hip hop record label, since 1989, sorted by their artists' chart performance on Billboard.
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The Most Timeless Songs of All-Time
Using Spotify to measure the popularity of older music.
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The Largest Vocabulary in Hip Hop
Rappers, ranked by the number of unique words used in their lyrics.
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Outkast, in Charts
A look at Outkast's history through the lens of data.
