Fall is for PSLs, politics, Tiny Desk and big data 📊🎶

Hello Storybenchers!

Happy Friday, Benchies! Well, this week fiiiiiinally started to feel a little like fall🍁, but the last few weeks could’ve fooled me 🌞. Can’t say we’re complaining; who doesn’t love a few bonus beach days, or afternoons on the common, but is THIS the new normal? We’ll be breaking down THAT question and so much more this week.

Let’s get to it ⬇️

Here is our featured content this week:

🎶 How I scraped and visualized over 1,500 NPR Tiny Desk concerts

To know NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts, is to love them. Graduate of Northeastern’s Media Innovation and Data Communication program Elijah Nicholson-Messmer transformed his affinity into analysis, using a host of tools including a web-scraping package called Playwright, Last.fm’s artists API, Datawrapper, Adobe Illustrator, some CSS and JavaScript for animation, and last but not least, ChatGPT (we won’t tell if you don’t 😉) to scrape and visualize over 1,500 NPR Tiny Desk concerts. The goal? To see what’s changed. The answer? A lot. Take a look! 

👀 Decoding the Debate: Analyzing the text of the Harris-Trump Face-off

From heated exchanges to subtle (and not so subtle) digs, the Harris-Trump debate on Sept. 10 left plenty to unpack. Last week may have been our debate newsletter buuuut we’re all going to need more than a week to get over THAT night. Here’s the data-driven debrief you’ve been waiting for. And you know we pulled about as many punches as the candidates (meaning 0). From data driven analysis of everything each candidate said (or didn’t say), the questions they answered (or didn’t), to insights on the distinct communication strategies and policy priorities of both candidates revealed in this heated 90 minutes, we’ve got it all. Take a peek 👀

Cool Stuff Corner: What are we reading?

🥵 How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born?

Moving right along with this week’s theme of seasons and endless summer… ever wondered what your hometown’s summer will look like a few decades from now? The answers may shock you, and not in a good way. Thanks to this New York Times piece, you can see for yourself. And talk about some seriously cool and personalized data vis! But don’t take our word for it. Plug your birth year and hometown and see for yourself 🌞

⛄ ☀️ Summer or winter: Which season is warming faster in your town?

When we think of climate change, we often think of things getting warmer ☀️, but this 2024 Washington Post piece illustrates that that’s only part of the picture. As Climate Lab columnist Harry Stevens articulates, over the past 80 years, winter temps have risen approx. 0.28° Fahrenheit per decade, outpacing the summer rate of 0.22 degrees per decade. We all know climate change is upon us, a reality reinforced seemingly every time you turn on the news (or unlock your phone, since it’s 2024) to behold yet another “unprecedented” disaster. But to what degree, and in what ways, seems to be a topic of debate. Put it this way, whether you’re a beach bum or a snow bunny, if you share this 🌎, this one’s for you.   

🎃 Waiting for fall weather to enjoy pumpkin spice lattes? You may miss them.

And now for some less depressing fall insights…It’s Boston, so you know we can’t talk about seasons without talking about coffee – and by that we mean pumpkin coffee (obviously). We’re bringing back and oldie but a goodie here, with Lauren Tierney’s timeless Washington Post article that sheds light on the thing we’ve all been thinking (love it or hate it): what’s with the fall drinks and moving up their release dates every year!? How much earlier are we talking, and which brands are the worst offenders? Let’s take a look 🎃

🎃☕How we mapped pumpkin spice lattes to teach students digital storytelling skills

Speaking of the iconic #PSL, back in 2015, Northeastern’s own Associate Professor and Graduate Programs Director Meg Heckman sat down with Storybench to shed light on her use of data mapping to bring stories to life—here visualizing the cultural phenomenon we all hold dear (or vehemently detest) the pumpkin spice latte. With the goal of documenting the pumpkin spice craze on New Hampshire’s Seacoast, Hackman partnered with The Sound, a weekly newspaper covering local arts and culture. As Hackman explained, “Working with a professional news outlet upped the stakes a bit for students and gave us a place to show off what we eventually named The Pumpkin Spice Index.” Check out this pumpkin-spice powered project and learn all about the data vis hacks behind it! 🎃☕

📱Quantifying the Twitter attacks on Kamala Harris During and following the Democratic debates

Here’s an interestingly relevant blast from the past. In 2015, founding editor of Storybench and current director of data visualization at Urban Institute Aleszu Bajak took a step back to analyze attacks on Twitter (X, whatever)  targetting Kamala Harris during and following the democratic debates. The data may be old, but the insights are interesting food for thought as we look at the rhetoric flying around now from both sides. Let’s see what you think!📱

That's all we've got for this week! Thanks for reading, and let us know if there's anything you'd like to see in these newsletters or in our coverage at [email protected].

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