Selected Work

In 2021, WNYC/Gothamist got the NYPD's full civilian-complaint dataset through a FOIL request and handed it to me — every complaint and every officer since 2000, including officers named only as witnesses and complaints the CCRB never substantiated. Noisier than the data ProPublica had published a year earlier, but for mapping a network that noise is the signal: being named on a complaint alongside another officer, even an unfounded one, means the two of them interacted in a way the public noticed.

❚❚

It started as a prototype I made in January — a touchscreen way to explore county-level election results — that I demoed to Adam, then to Steve, then to Marc, until it got the budget and became the real thing: the "Big Board" Steve Kornacki wields on air, live, in front of ten to nineteen million people. (NewscastStudio wrote up a later update.)

I have gotten pretty good at saving interesting things that I see on the internet. Anytime I read something I think I might want to reference, show someone, or think about later, I chuck it into my bookmarks. I've done this for over 10 years now, making little notes of my favorite things while wading through the ever-expanding deluge of "content." Now I want to take a step back and map the constellations that emerge.

❚❚

Connectology is for me — a custom front-end replacement for Gephi or a raw D3 force layout: build graphs of nodes and links, then analyze the resulting structure with force-directed layout and graph metrics. The v2 rebuild adds AI-powered node generation and multiple import formats (Obsidian, Mermaid, CSV).

❚❚

I was perusing Mastodon, as one does, and noticed a post from journalist Micah Lee saying he was exploring a 200GB dump from American paramilitary groups — a leak made possible through the incredible bravery of John Williams, who infiltrated these groups and exfiltrated the data. I hadn't heard of the dump before, and immediately sent Micah an email offering to help with any dataviz.

❚❚

I spend all day looking at screens that want something from me. Pixel Canvas is a screen that doesn't — a networked 320×240 display that sits on my desk and quietly shows me my own life in the Vulpes palette.

❚❚

Along with Gerald Rich and the Vocativ data team, I received a Knight Prototype Fund grant to create Dataproofer - an open source tool to check data for reliability, missing data, and outliers. Built as an Electron desktop app for journalists.

❚❚

I often just leave the Flipper on my desk below my monitor, and my feeling was: why not have it show me little evolving art pieces instead of just the time? What would that look and feel like? Is generative art even possible within the constraints of the Flipper's screen and processor? What does 1-bit generative art feel like? How can it evolve over the course of a day?

3Blue1Brown-style animated explainers of the I Ching — the 64 hexagrams, the binary structure Leibniz saw in them, the coin-toss probabilities — rendered as precise mathematical motion graphics in the vulpes monochrome palette with Manim.

❚❚