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 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 :)