By Ben Blatt

I’m Ben Blatt, a writer and data journalist.

I have always been fascinated by the ubiquitous patterns in culture. I love to quantify things that everyone senses on a gut level but may have never been described precisely or definitely. Are best-selling authors writing in a simpler tone than they used to? Are sitcoms cramming in more and more jokes? Is Waldo getting harder to find?

I try to tell a story which is filled with trends and data but does not overwhelm the reader with too much information. My writing is meant to entertain more than it is serve as a reference. I want to create clear graphs which capture the larger points and distill figures in the writing to the easiest to understand point. Because I want the writing to be enjoyable and quick to read, I
tend to write about simple terms like averages, maximums, or ranges and leave the more complex statistical work in the notes or in the code.

I use Python for most of my work and more recently love working with the Pandas package. Most of the work involves taking a messy data source and distilling that into simple outputs. For example, I may need to find the number of times a particular phrase was used by JK Rowling in all her Harry Potter books and compare it to the rate that same phrase was used by amateur
authors posting Harry Potter fan-fiction online. With some packages such as NLTK for python individual questions may only take a few lines of codes to answer.

When I am displaying the information online, such as building an interactive widget which helps add to the article, I like to code in D3 and JavaScript. I particularly like D3 which allows graphs and figures to be animated beautifully with simple code. When I am displaying the information
in a book I usually use Adobe Illustrator. Although this requires more customization and a simpler result, the aesthetic matches the format I am trying to achieve.

Although I use the same set of languages and programs for the majority of my work I find it important to be willing to learn new languages or packages to accomplish a specific task.

What tools and programming languages do I use?

  • Python

  • JavaScript + D3

Ben Blatt is the author of Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve and I Don’t Care If We Never Get Back.