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Matt is visual journalist based in Detroit, reporting on stories that struggle to be told with prose alone.

To advance the craft of visual storytelling, he founded two organizations...

Polygraph

Data Visualization Studio (Est. 2015)

Clients

Kickstarter

Google

YouTube

Converse

Sony Music

Universal Music Group

IBM

The Atlantic

Google News

Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery

The Boston Globe

Climate Impact Lab

Netflix

Strava

Salesforce

Emerson Collective

Harvard Kennedy School

Linkedin

Planned Parenthood

Aspen Institute

The Pudding

Digital Journal for Visual Essays (Est. 2017)

Awards

SND Gold Medal, 2024

SND Best in Show, 2024

Online Journalism Awards, General Excellence in Online Journalism, 2023

SND, World’s Best Designed Finalist, 2023

SND Silver Medal, 2020

Online Journalism Awards, General Excellence in Online Journalism, 2019

Data journalism website of the year, Data Journalism Awards, 2019

SND Gold Medal, 2018

Peabody, Digital Journalism, 2017

Individual Awards

Emmy Nomination, Analysis of protests in Minneapolis with the Washington Post

World Press Photo’s Interactive of the Year, Analysis of protests in Minneapolis with the Washington Post

Product Hunt’s Best of 2020 Award, How Bad is Your Spotify?

Emmy nomination, We measured pop music’s falsetto obsession

Breakthroughs in Storytelling Award, Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab, Structure of Stand-Up Comedy

Information is Beautiful Awards, Silver, How music taste evolved

Information is Beautiful Awards, Bronze, The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender

Information is Beautiful Awards, Gold, Rappers, sorted by the size of their vocabulary

Projects

Authored

Rappers, sorted by their vocabulary size

Sample Stitch

Flooding in America with Gannett

The Emotional Range of GIFs

Identifying Generational Gaps in Music

Are Men Singing Higher in Pop Music?

We measured pop music’s falsetto obsession with Vox

The Kim Foxx Effect with The Marshall Project

The Worst, Highest-paid NBA Player

The Best Year in Music with Billboard

A People Map of the US

The Gyllenhaal Experiment

Population Mountains

Human Terrain

Fan Theory with Viacom

The Most Emo Rap

Mapping Gastronomic Borders in the US

The Structure of Stand-Up Comedy

What Airport Traffic Tells Us About the World’s Megacities

The Cultural Borders of Songs

What is a Superteam in the NBA?

Plot Trends for Top-Grossing Film from the Past 50 Years

The Most Timeless NBA Plays

The Words That Are “Most Hip Hop”

The Emergence Of Slang, Using Search Data

Do NBA Refs Favor the Home Team?

How Diverse Are US Newsrooms? with Google

Mapping Slavery Against US Incarceration

How Robert Glasper Sampled Miles Davis on “Ghetto Walkin” with Sony

Ranking the Most Unlikely NBA Comebacks

The 2,452 Wikipedia Pages on which Miles Davis is Mentioned with Sony

Crowdsourcing the Definition of “Punk” with Converse

The Most Succesful Labels in Hip Hop with Rhymesayers

The Largest Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender, Ever

Hollywood’s Gender Divide and its Effect on Films

The Most Timeless Songs of All-Time

Outkast, in Charts

The Etymology of Shorty

The Entire History of Kickstarter with Kickstarter

Trump vs. Clinton, by YouTube views with Google News

Transcending Oil with Emerson Collective

Defining the ’90s Music Canon

Reconstructing a timeline of protests using live-streams with The Washington Post

How bad is your Spotify

15 Percent Pledge x Whole Foods with 15 Percent Pledge

Photo History Experiment

Universal Music Lobby Visualization with Universal Music Group

Get out of your Geographic Music Bubble

We couldn’t get an artificial intelligence program to win the New Yorker Caption Contest

Weather Record Map

Weather Records from Yesterday

We tracked what happens after TikTok songs go viral with Vox

Billion Views Club with YouTube

Speedruns Video with YouTube

Gender in Songwriting

Heat Records Map v2

The ’90s Literary Canon

TikTok and Virality

Analyzing Spotify’s Database of 6,000 Genres

The Language of Congress with Salesforce

YouTube’s End of Year Recap with YouTube

The Rise of Aesthetics with YouTube

For the Love of Sneakers with YouTube

Behind the Lists: 2022’s Breakout Creators with YouTube

Examining 30 years of Rolling Stone’s “Greatest Albums of All Time” Rankings

Misc