Jacob Harris
Jacob Harris is a Senior Software Architect who works with a kickass team of fellow newsroom developers at the New York Times.
Jacob’s work on Source
Code
Projects
- Thank You, Electionbot
- Connecting with the Dots
- Gender, Twitter, and the Value of Taking Things Apart
- SRCCON: How Not to Skew Data with Statistics
- Bots with Thoughts
- Watching the Results Change
- They Are Tweet Zombies!! They Are Followers!!
- The Perils of Polling Twitter
- Strongbox Reactions, Part II
- How the Data Sausage Gets Made
- The New York Times’ Election Results Loader
Articles by Jacob
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Just One Thing: A Year in Review, Part I
Appreciation of usefulness and bar-raising at the end of a long, complicated year
Posted onAs we did last year, we’ve asked a couple of dozen people from all around the news-nerd community to tell us about one thing—article, feature, app, tool, or something else entirely—that they loved in 2015. This week, we’re publishing their responses, from interactives to project management software. We hope you find here at least one thing that eases your work, inspires new angles on your stories, and helps carry you through to 2016.
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Thank You, Electionbot
A friendly bot that will shoulder the burden of monitoring offers peace of mind as well as efficient notifications
Posted onOffloading some of a burden of continuous human monitoring to a friendly bot can be just the comfort you need on a cold Election Night.
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Consider the Boolean
The Challenge of Using Binary Data Structures in a Complicated World
Posted onThe challenge of using binary data structures in a complicated world.
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Connecting with the Dots
Jake Harris on data visualization, empathy, and representing people with dots
Posted onJake Harris on data visualization, empathy, and representing people with dots
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Gender, Twitter, and the Value of Taking Things Apart
Jake Harris reverse-engineers Twee-Q to evaluate its use of data (and see if his ratio is as disappointing as Twee-Q says it is)
Posted onJake Harris reverse-engineers Twee-Q to evaluate its use of data (and see if his ratio is as disappointing as Twee-Q says it is)
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Distrust Your Data
Jacob Harris on Six Ways to Make Mistakes with Data
Posted onJacob Harris on six ways to make mistakes with data—and how to avoid them.
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Bots with Thoughts
Jacob Harris on magic, aesthetics, and the newsbot frontier
Posted onJacob Harris on magic, aesthetics, and the newsbot frontier.
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And Remember, this Is for Posterity
Jacob Harris on the hows and whys of designing interactives to survive the future
Posted onJacob Harris on the hows and whys of designing interactives to survive the future.
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Watching the Results Change
The New York Times’ Jacob Harris on Election Projections
Posted onJacob Harris on the challenges of reporting and calling elections and the making of the NYT’s chart of minute-by-minute Virginia governor’s race reporting action.
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The Times Regrets the Programmer Error
Jake Harris opens a serious barrel of monkeys about when and how to issue corrections for data journalism
Posted onJake Harris opens a serious barrel of monkeys about when and how to issue corrections for data journalism.
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They Are Tweet Zombies!! They Are Followers!!
Jake Harris on how dead accounts and spambots can mess with your Twitter data mojo
Posted onJake Harris on how dead accounts and spambots can mess with your Twitter data mojo
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The Perils of Polling Twitter
Jake Harris on just a few of the myriad reasons why using tweets as data is less-than-ideal
Posted onJake Harris on just a few of the myriad reasons why using tweets as data is less than ideal.
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Strongbox Reactions, Part II
Jacob Harris, Jonathan Stray, and Mike Tigas weigh in
Posted onWe asked for your thoughts on Strongbox, the New Yorker’s new implementation of DeadDrop. Our first wave of responses includes the New York Times’ Jacob Harris, the Overview Project’s Jonathan Stray, and Mike Tigas, OpenNews Fellow at ProPublica.
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How the Data Sausage Gets Made
Jacob Harris on Turning Freeform Text into Journalism
Posted onJacob Harris explains the perils of making government food safety data usable for journalistic research.
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The New York Times’ Election Results Loader
Jacob Harris explains how it was made, tuned and tested
Posted onJacob Harris breaks down the data, the code choices, and the rationales behind the NYT’s results loader for the US 2012 elections.