Hi! I'm Matt. I enjoy telling stories with data.
Here are some of my favorites:
BALLOT
A tracker for where abortion rights were on the ballot during the 2022 midterms
Playing with cartograms and exploring the idea that public libraries could play a role in sheltering people from increasingly extreme weather
A look at whether tiny homes can help relieve the affordable housing shortage in Austin and Seattle
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 project that 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'm finishing up my MS in data science and data journalism at the University of Missouri (May 2023 graduation). Previously, I worked as a political reporter in Texas at The Texas Tribune, the Austin American-Statesman and KWTX-TV. I received 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 :)