Inside the Republican Database Behind David Jolly’s Upset Victory

To hear Republican strategists involved with David Jolly’s campaign tell it, the newest Republican in Congress owes his victory to a “Honeybadger.” That’s what officials at National Republican Congressional Committee call the voter database they’ve spent a year tirelessly building from scratch, which they argue was essential to Jolly’s surprising […] Read more »

Big data in the age of the telegraph

In 1854, Daniel McCallum took charge of the operations of the New York and Erie Railroad. With nearly 500 miles of track, it was one of the world’s longest systems, but not one of the most efficient. In fact, McCallum found that far from rendering operations more efficient, the scale […] Read more »

Big (Bad) Data

… Social media and Big Data, the term du jour for the collection of vast troves of information that can instantaneously be synthesized, are supposed to help us make smarter, faster decisions. It seems as if just about every C.E.O. of a global company these days is talking about how […] Read more »

Project Ivy: Democrats Taking Obama Technology Down Ballot

Fifteen months after the 2012 presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee announced a new effort Monday to make the advanced data tools used by the Obama campaign available to Democratic candidates across the country. The initiative, nicknamed Project Ivy, will take many of the sophisticated data, analytics, and communications tools […] Read more »

The democratization of data journalism

The proliferation of interesting and easy-to-access internet-based data combined with fast computers and free or cheap analysis and visualization tools are democratizing and popularizing the field of data journalism. But what are the rules, parameters, and guidelines for this work which, like its name, bridges the worlds of data and […] Read more »