Last week, ProPublica’s Olga Pierce wrote to the NICAR-L list asking for help putting together a list of “happy data stories” or stories related to the arts, at the request of some of her students. The listers responded in force, and many of those who offered links gave us permission to post them here, so we’re sending you off into the (US) Thanksgiving holiday weekend with a fat stack of reading that probably won’t make you feel worse.

Many thanks, NICAR-L!

Local, Civic, and Not Completely Bleak (Except the Roadkill)

• The Man who Gives out the Most Parking Tickets in Boston. “I profiled the officer who gives out the most parking tickets in Boston. (Turns out he’s actually a good guy.)”
• Behind the Dialect Map Interactive. “A New York Times intern created an interactive that guessed where you are from based on what terms/phrases you use.”
• UMass Amherst Police Issue More Traffic Violations Than Most Municipal Departments. “A colleague and I found a Massachusetts university police department gives out more traffic tickets than most towns in the state.”
• How Hard Is It to Give Away a Half-Million Dollars?. “Turns out many states have trouble giving away money in their Unclaimed Property fund.”
• Largest U.S. Roadkill Database Highlights Hotspots on Bay Area Highways. “Road kill maps. Many states have assembled databases of animals killed on roads.”
• Where The Fans Of Every Baseball Team Live, According To Facebook. Sports stories. There are lots of fun sports stories with data. Here’s a Buzzfeed map of Facebook data showing where fans of different teams live.

—Todd Wallack

—David Henry Montgomery

Sneakin’ Toward the Weekend, Workers Fill Roadways “How about using hourly traffic counting stations to show how people are cheating out of the office earlier and earlier on Fridays? Mental note: we’re four years away from that link being older than my incoming freshmen. Also, note the wonder at phones able to receive email being someday widely available in the story.” —Matt Waite

What Long Island Drives. “In the car-centric suburbs, we were just curious about what people drive.” —Tim Healy

Even “serious” data can sometimes result in positive stories:

• Minnesota teen driving deaths plummet: Better drivers or fewer teens?. “We looked at death data and found that there’s been a huge drop in teenagers dying in car accidents.”
• Unlikely new hot spots in Twin Cities housing market. “We also used real estate data to look at which cities in the area have the ‘hottest’ housing markets. We could’ve flipped that story around and looked at which communities are NOT recovering as fast from the recession.”
• “We recently did a series of small stories based on land use data—highlighting interesting changes we found, including one story about golf courses being converted to subdivisions, another about the changes in where gravel is being mined, another on how the growth in parkland has slowed in recent years, another kind of giving an overview of big changes (like industrial sites being converted to housing) and paired it with a cool interactive map.”
• “Every week we publish a feature we call ‘Data Drop‘ that is heavily focused on data, with lots of visualizations. In the nearly two years that we’ve been publishing, we’ve covered a huge variety of topics. More often than not they are either positive-leaning or at least neutral.”

—MaryJo Webster

Arts & Music

This Is Your Brain on Art. “Not a traditional ‘data story,’ but this cool piece shows how the arts affect your brain.” —Darla Cameron

• A Statistical Curiosity Voyage Through the Emotion of Stranger Things. “This may be a little more technical, but here is a sentiment analysis of every Stanger Things episode. I really like this one.”
• The Language of Hip Hop. “Another brilliant one from the Pudding about the most frequent words used in Hip Hop. There is so much one can do with text analysis.” (Also cited by Evan Wyloge.)
• Star Wars Phrases. “In fact, for a class project at Syracuse, I scraped all the Star Wars scripts and presented a histogram of some of the more popular Star Wars phrases, by episode and by character.”

—Mahima Singh

Datamud. “One of my very first MA Online Journalism students—a former radio presenter—caught the data journalism bug and applied it to music festivals. It looks a bit dated now but back in 2009 it was quite refreshing to see data skills being applied to music.” —Paul Bradshaw

How Does “Hamilton,” the Non Stop, Hip-Hop Broadway Sensation Tap Rap’s Master Rhymes to Blur Musical Lines?. “I don’t think anyone has mentioned the amazing WSJ Hamilton story.” —Meredith Broussard

Baby Names Get Their Own List

From Abner to Zuri, Baby Names Fluctuate in Popularity in Virginia. “Ron Campbell and Lucia Walinchus mentioned baby names; one of my data journalism students, Gillian Bullock, did a story on that this week.” (Interactive graphics. Extracts of the data cited in the report are available as a web page and as a downloadable/sortable spreadsheet. The entire dataset.) —Jeff South

“Baby names is the best data, IMO. I have a repo that has the SSA data in various flat file compilations. And the Census recently put out surname data for 2010, so you can compare with their previous release of 2000 data.”
—Dan Nguyen

Exuberant Miscellany & Happy Infographics

• How Toxic Are Your Favourite Firecrackers?. “The Hindustan Times made this interactive where you can measure how much air pollution is caused by certain types of firecrackers. I guess it’s not happy, but it is different.”
• How People Come to Nallur. “Interesting Data Analysis. Tracking population based on cellular data.”
• Where to Find the Good Life. “And speaking of happiness, National Geographic did this story on the states with the highest and lowest well-being based on surveys results.”

—Mahima Singh

• Giant Wawa Hoagie. “I like infographics for happy data stories. Here’s a quickie I did about a giant hoagie.”
• Best American Infographics
• Occupation Matchmaker
• Data Visualization Design and the Art of Depicting Reality

—Meredith Broussard

• A Data Scientist’s Emoji Guide to Kanye West and Taylor Swift
• The Resistance Will Be Emojified
• The Top Emojis of Election Day ​

—Hamdan Azhar

Some geospatial examples:

• Starbucks locations
• Trees in SF
• NEA grants
• College scorecard
• NYC turnstile data
• Counting the Jay-Z Subway Crowd

—Dan Nguyen

Winner: Best Categorization Scheme

“I use Pinboard to tag examples by category so you can just add whatever term you like to https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+ —for example:

• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+art
• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+sport
• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+music
• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+film
• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+tv
• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+entertainment
• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+food
• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+fashion
• https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+animals

And, er… https://pinboard.in/u:paulbradshaw/t:dj+zombies”

—Paul Bradshaw

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