Hi! I'm Matt. I enjoy telling stories with data.
Here are some of my favorites:
We mapped where police officers issued homeless ‘encampment’ tickets in Houston. A familiar shape of inequality emerged in this interactive map-based story.
I played with cartograms and explored the idea that public libraries could play a role in sheltering people from increasingly extreme weather.
HISTORY FACT CHECK
Current Houston Mayor John Whitmire called himself a criminal justice reformer who’s tough on crime. We analyzed three decades of his legislative record in the Texas Senate and compiled a database.
political maps and trackers:
I am endlessly fascinated by the world of Texas politics. Political maps, trackers and living databases are among my favorite projects.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was criticized by some of her former staffers for being a tough boss whose behavior sometimes strays into abuse. We cobbled together decades of staff salary records and determined that she indeed has a staff retention issue.
MONEY
The most comprehensive database of campaign finance records in Harris County and Texas-based races, including records scraped from Harris County's notoriously fussy watermarked PDFs
A representation of how Texas House districts largely have become more competitive in the election cycles after redistricting only to flip back immediately after being redrawn
other recent data science-y projects:
A Python scraper that visits nearly 200 local news sites in Missouri daily and scrapes the news articles — data to be used in my upcoming data science master's thesis on news deserts
A database project that scrapes Google News and aims to document all incidents since 2016 in which local elected officials resigned because they received threats or experienced other forms of harassment
A Python scraper for extracting data from monthly building permit reports in Columbia, Missouri
more about me:
I earned my MS in data science and data journalism at the University of Missouri (May 2023). My thesis focused on using natural language processing and machine learning models to better understand so-called "news deserts." Previously, I worked as a political reporter in Texas at The Texas Tribune, the Austin American-Statesman and KWTX-TV. I earned my BS in journalism and BA in economics from Northwestern University.
I'm particularly interested in covering the intersection of politics and culture through a data lens. I'm a huge fan of the color yellow and, if given the opportunity, rarely pass up the chance to use some shade of it in a data visualization :)