Field notes 5 pieces

Stories in data.

Visual essays on language, public data, and the things worth counting — plus the tools to go digging yourself.

Analysis / / 5 min read Latest

The whistle they didn't blow

The NBA grades its own officiating in the final two minutes of close games and publishes the results. Eighty-nine thousand graded calls later, the errors have a shape — and the question everyone wants answered turns out to be the one the data is worst at.

SportsOfficiating With explorer
Interactive / / Police data
02

OpenPDI

Use-of-force incidents and officer-involved shootings from U.S. police departments, standardized into one schema.

Interactive / / MapLibre
03

Buoywatch

Every station the National Data Buoy Center reports, live on one map — filterable by program and owner.

OceansLive data Open tool
Analysis / / 4 min read
04

Tombstone.js: A propositional logic library

A library for evaluating well-formed formulas, built to find out how much of an introductory logic course automates cleanly. Written in 2016; the demos here run the real parser.

JavaScriptLogic With explorer