Bio
Matt Daniels is a Journalist-Engineer and Business lead/CEO at The Pudding. He first experienced Internet fame in 2014 and has been chasing that feeling ever since.
Stories
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NBA Spelling Bee
A spelling bee for the hardest names in the NBA.
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most discussed
The Gyllenhaal Experiment
The many ways to misspell the hardest names in pop culture.
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most viewed
Rappers, Sorted by the Size of their Vocabulary
The number of unique lyrics used within artists’ first 35,000 lyrics
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most buzzworthy
Population Mountains
This is a story about how to perceive the population size of cities.
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most buzzworthy
Human Terrain: Population in 3D
Visualizing the World’s Population as a Terrain
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The Most Emo Lyrics: Emo Rap vs. Dashboard Confessional
Who has more emotionally vulnerable lyrics, emo-rap or Dashboard Confessional?
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What Airport Traffic Tells Us About the World's Megacities
Kinshasa, DR Congo, a city of 13 million people 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.
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Are Hit Songs Becoming Less Musically Diverse?
Today’s hit artists are take fewer risks and create a narrower range of sounds
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most engaging
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?
Defining what a superteam is with data
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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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Plot Trends for 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 is one of the most debated questions in policy.
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Do NBA Refs Favor the Home Team?
Analyzing reviewed calls to rank NBA 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 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, you can find Davis' fingerprints on many other ideas.
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most viewed
How Music Taste Evolved
Top 5 songs, from '58-'16, so we can stop arguing about when music was still good
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Ranking the Most Unlikely NBA Comebacks
Identify the most statistically unlikely comebacks this season
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most viewed
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
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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
Hip hop record labels, 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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Outkast, in Charts
A look at Outkast's history through the lens of data