New project! We built an A.I. bot that mercilessly judges your taste in music on Spotify. See how your data stacks up against millions of indicators of objectively good music, including Pitchfork reviews and record store recommendations
Curl up with a good book and you're likely to read about women with "soft lips" and men with "broad shoulders." Women often are reduced to their sexuality—men to their strength. We examined 2K books to see how authors describe men's/women's physical traits
In a new project and forthcoming series,
@matthew_daniels
will be exploring population changes with an interactive experience that visualizes the world's largest cities.
NEW PROJECT ALERT 📸👩🏿👩🏾👩🏽👩🏼👩🏻
@malicodes
programmatically looked at 19 years of covers to find how Vogue magazine represents women of all shades. Spoiler: They could do better.
New project! 📕📚 We sorted 5,000 book covers by visual similarity using machine learning and created an interactive map. Find book cover clusters of faces, beaches, super-bold type, and the many visual motifs that pervade best-seller lists. LINK ->
One of our staff's first projects, Rappers sorted by the Size of Their Vocabulary, is updated for the first time in 5 years: 75 new artists added, including Lil Uzi Vert, Brockhampton, Death Grips, Travis Scott, Migos, and more...
1) Gen Z is far more likely to recognize "Wannabe" than "No Scrubs." 2) Will Smith is falling into obscurity. These are two realizations from a new project about how future generations will recognize '90s music.
New project! We worked with
@PamelaMishkin
on a personal “choose your own adventure” essay that blurs and redraws the lines between what’s real and what’s GPT-3 generated in search of a “better” ending.
New Essay! ✨👖 You aren't imagining it. After measuring the pockets from 20 brands of blue jeans, we've found that, on average, women's pockets are A LOT smaller than men's. Dive into the data and the repercussions of pocket inequality:
(1/15) Today
@matthew_daniels
examines the notion of “population mountains.” Read the full article in the link below, and you can also follow along with Matt’s observations in this tweet thread.
Friendly reminder that we are always accepting pitches from freelancers and collaborators at all experience levels! We are especially interested in hearing from underrepresented voices in journalism; however you identify, we want your data-driven, visual stories on any topic 1/
Crossword puzzles have been criticized for being too old, too white, too male... and rightfully so.
@michmac202
looked at the NYTimes + 4 other publications to see how often women and people from minoritized racial groups are represented in the squares.
For most of our visualizations, we use d3.js to create and arrange SVG shapes. Check out our latest blog post to learn how we use d3.js + Flexbox to make waffle charts, modified histograms, and stacked bar charts without any SVG!
This is “Martin.”
At 7:20am he watches TV.
At 10:15am he gets groceries.
At noon he eats lunch.
At 5:10pm he watches more TV.
At 8:30pm he goes to bed.
“Martin” lives a pretty isolated life. Find out why this matters in our newest piece by
@alv9n
.
New project! Curious what your teachers never taught you about the Aztec Gods? This visual essay, written and illustrated by Gwendal Uguen (with code by
@lucguillemot
), is a good place to start.
NEW PROJECT! We combed through nearly 38,000 headlines from 2015–2019 to find out how the media covers millennials: from what we supposedly kill (RIP doorbell industry 💀🚪🔔) to what we love (hello, cooking shows 🍳📺). Dig into all our findings here:
New Essay! In the 48 hours after Prince died, he got 11 million pageviews on Wikipedia - 66,000% higher than his normal traffic. We analyzed three years of Wikipedia traffic to learn more about how we digitally mourn celebrities.
New work (work, work, work, work, work) 💅
@Rihanna
's
@fentybeauty
launched last year with a ground-breaking 40 shades of foundation, making it a champion of inclusivity in the makeup world. How do other brands across the US and the world stack up?
Three years ago we started a how-to series aimed at helping people create data-driven, visual stories. And TODAY, we're finally giving you the last installment! Check out Part 3 of How to Make Dope Shit: Storytelling.
Congrats, you’ve almost survived 2018! 🎉This year has been a doozy & it’s hard to keep up, but we’re here to help. We analyzed
@nytimes
headlines to find the most frequent words in each decade since 1900. Consider this a condensed history lesson! 🤓📰
New essay: If you have ever typed something on a smartphone, you have likely seen it attempt to predict what you’ll write next. This is a story about how text predictors work (bonus: learn about algorithms!)
Well… that took longer that expected! The monkeys finally plinked out "Happy Birthday" on our experimental piano. Only took 13,226,550,248,601 tries (48% more than expected). Check back to see if they figure out “Cello Suite No. 1”... in under 5 years.
New project!
@Leonardonclt
&
@SahitiSarva
analyzed more than a decade of headlines from 4 countries to see how women are (mis)represented in news. (1/6)
We are very excited to announce the winners of our fourth-annual Pudding Cup! 🏆 Here are our picks for the best non-commercial visual and data-driven stories of 2020. 1/5
New project! We worked with
@lars_vers
to build a model that attempts to predict a wine’s quality. See if you can find the perfect balance of properties to produce a winner — or a washout. Cheers! 🍷
🚨 DOUBLE RELEASE! (our second looking through the
@NYTArchives
)
@codenberg
takes you on a world tour 🌎 through the eyes of the US by looking at the countries that appeared most frequently in headlines each month since 1900.
New project: we're tracking generational gaps in music. 9% of gen z recognizes "With Arms Wide Open" by Creed, while only a third of millennials can identify "Return to Sender" by Elvis. Help us out by taking the quiz here:
Ever wondered how The Pudding team starts with an idea and turns it into a full-blown visual essay? We've mapped out our process and included all the places where our stories continue, change, or get left behind.
We’re excited to announce The Pudding’s 2024 Cohort, a 10-week summer fellowship for aspiring visual storytellers.
🧑🎓 Open to college/graduate-level students and recent grads
📅 June 18 – Sept 1
💰 $7,200 stipend
📝 More details at this link!
Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" has 993,127,832 views—just 7 million away from 1 billion! To celebrate,
@codenberg
created a visual history of rickrolling, charting thousands of comments, posts, and links (cc
@rickastley
)
NEW PROJECT ALERT! We found all the pubs in the UK with the same name and mapped the shortest route between them for some epic pub crawls. 339 Red Lions = 339 pints, so bottoms up! 🍻
Generate your own pub crawl here:
🚨Drumroll Please! 🚨We're excited to announce the winners of The Pudding Cup! It was beyond challenging to narrow down the 100s of entries we received, but our panel of judges has crowned these data and visually-driven stories as the best of the year 🏆
🚨New project🚨
@iliablinderman
put together a data-driven travel guide to the US so you can have something to look forward post-quarantine & plan your next trip. Whether you prefer popular tourist attractions or local haunts, we've got you covered.
They say authors write what they know. But do they also write "where" they know? Check out our deep-dive into how far a book is set from the places its author has called home. 📚
New essay: an exploration of the music of skateboarding. In a time before Spotify or Pandora, skate videos provided something of a music tastemaker—a playlist of what's cool. The playlist spanned all genres. It felt diverse. It felt countercultural.
When making music, there are rules to follow. But the best things come when you break them. In our latest piece, we deconstruct the phenomenon of "Dilla Feel", a game-changing way of thinking about rhythm pioneered by producer J Dilla.
New Essay: Birth control can be complicated. So we analyzed the experiences of over 20,000 users to learn more about it. This story comes complete with a helper ready to explain the inner-workings of every possible method of contraception.
New project! Are men singing higher in pop music? That’s the question collaborator Estelle Caswell at Vox asked, noticing more male vocalists exploiting their upper singing register. We ran the data...check it out ->
1/ New Project: for issues that occupy the political discourse (e.g., gun control, immigration) how often are elected officials mentioning the topic publicly? We explored this question using tweets from members of Congress
There are a lot of summer reading lists out there, but we decided to throw our hat in the ring and create a data-driven guide to the less sought after books. 📚👓Consider this The Pudding's Hipster Reading List.
New video-based project with
@andronovhopf
: We looked at a dataset of over 30,000 high school yearbook photos from 1930–2013 to identify hairstyle trends & find when big hair was at its height. Watch the intro below and see the full project at .
New Project!
@cdallarivamusic
analyzes the remarkable trend that most hit songs are written by all men. How often has a top 5 hit been written by *only* women in the last 10 years? It’s likely rarer than you think.
Subscription services make signing up easy, but canceling especially hard.
@carolinesinders
documents the process of trying to unsubscribe from 16 digital subscriptions.
This is how companies use dark patterns to force you to stay.
Here at The Pudding, we’re strong supporters of journalism and are sad to see what some of our friends are going through today. We know that it’s in your DNA to never quit reporting, so if you have a data and/or visual story, hit us up. We’d love to collaborate & give it a home.
1/ New project: A study released today by
@FirstStreetFdn
examines flood risk for every property in America. We worked with several newsrooms to create embeddable charts for their local coverage that allow readers to explore the data.
🚨NEW STORY ALERT! 🚨We partnered with
@2nfo
to take a look at the evolution of the American census — what changes each decade, what stays the same, and what do the questions say about American culture and society?
Of the 6,816 foundation shades at Sephora & Ulta, 110 are named "nude". They look like this 👩🏻👩🏻👩🏻👩🏻👩🏻👩🏻👩🏽👩🏾confirming what many POC already know: beauty brands prioritize light skin tones. We worked with
@OfunneO
to surface more biases in shade names:
At The Pudding we strive to tell stories that challenge deep-seeded beliefs and tackle systemic issues through a cultural lens. This is a story about how racism touches every part of our day-to-day lives, including the memes we share:
New Project: The 2020 presidential primaries had the most diverse candidate field in modern political history, & the same is true for the logo color palettes. We looked at presidential designs from 1968–2020 to see how color intersects w/ race & gender.
We’re giving away a copy of “W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America” because his work helped inspire the designs for our latest piece on upward mobility. Here's how to enter 1. Like this tweet. 2. Reply and tag a friend who should follow us.
🐾New Post 🐕We used PetFinder to follow 2,460 adoptable dogs into new states looking for forever homes.
Like the 125 dogs in WA that came from TX or the 50 dogs in NJ from PR.
Dig into the where, why & growing controversy around cross-state adoption:
🐨Looking for some joyscrolling?🐧 We teamed up w/
@infowetrust
to create an updating digital zoo, feat. your fav zoo & aquarium animals from around the world. 🐼Watch pandas in Edinburgh, DC, & Atlanta without leaving your couch. Welcome to the Cloud Zoo!
High school dress codes are under constant scrutiny for being racist, sexist, promoting gender norms & sexualizing students. We're working on a series that adds data to each of these convos & today, we're releasing P1: how dress codes sexualize students
Country music is powered by women like
@carrieunderwood
,
@MarenMorris
&
@KelseaBallerini
. But even they are barely played back-to-back. We teamed up with
@data_jada
to look at back-to-back plays by gender, race & sexual orientation at 29 radio stations.
🚨INTERNSHIP ALERT🚨 Have you ever wanted to help put together a Pudding story, but don't have a portfolio? Have some starter data/viz skills and stacks of drive, but haven't had a chance to prove yourself yet? We've got the summer internship for you!
We've just updated our public backlog of story ideas! Rifle through the list of questions, datasets & half-baked thoughts, and see if anything sparks your curiosity. If so, feel free to use it as a starting point for a pitch…
New project! We explore how the most popular genres have shifted over the past 7 years, with K-pop now having more streams than R&B and EDM on Spotify.
>
We're proud to be able to contribute to
@propublica
's scholarship program this year.
Students: apply by Feb. 22 for $750 to help pay for your journalism expenses in 2021.
Attention data and visual storytellers: The Pudding Cup is back for 2020! We want to see the best under-the-radar non-commercial stuff you've made this year.
Cash prizes! 💰 No entry fee! 🚫 Extended timeframe! 🗓️
WE'RE HIRING! 🚨📣🎉
The Pudding is seeking a Managing Director to help oversee the team's editorial process & guide stories from idea to execution. This is a leadership role — we're looking for someone who has managed people & process before.
INFO HERE:
Introducing an experimental newsletter project, Winning the Internet. We've created a newsletter to surface the best links in OTHER newsletters. Here are this week's top links so far... 1/7 🍮 🤖 📬
We're starting a new series of bite-sized visual essays about science! This week,
@iliablinderman
highlights a curious 2013 finding: while we can access a study's results, getting a look at the raw, underlying data is surprisingly unlikely.
🚨New project🚨
How did scientists around the world come together to fight COVID-19? Jeff MacInnes explores the coronavirus-related publications of the past year to show just how impressive the research effort has been.
1/ New essay this week: Who is the biggest pop star in music? We evaluated 5 data sources: concert seats sold, YouTube/Spotify Views, GIFs, Reddit mentions, and social following.