Chase Davis
I'm a data journalist based in Northern California. Most recently, I worked as the Director of Technology at the Center for Investigative Reporting, where I oversaw a team of 10 engineers, news applications developers and data analysts dedicated to public service journalism.
In March 2013, I will be joining The New York Times as an assistant editor on the interactive news desk, focused on politics and campaigns.
Previously, I worked as an investigative reporter and data specialist at California Watch, the Des Moines Register and the Houston Chronicle, where my specialty was money and politics. I'm also founding partner of Hot Type Consulting, a boutique journalism technology firm, where among other things I helped build and launch the Texas Tribune.
I grew up in Minnesota and went to school at Mizzou. In my spare time, I enjoy watching baseball, cooking barbecue (Texas style) and learning blues and folk guitar.
Twitter- LinkedIn
- GitHub
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Tweets
- @jeremybowers He's no COLMAN or PNDLTN, that's for sure.
- Awesome. Chris Getz uses the RBI Baseball theme song as his entrance music. EVIDENCE: http://t.co/gHClGfOI6R
- Bayesian methods for hackers: http://t.co/PZtgwm4qpb
- @tiffehr Not tonight! Thought we'd give @jeremybmerrill's team a chance to win for once … ;)
- Adios, Andes. Off to bed before my 6 a.m. flight. Thanks so much for having me , #databootcamp La Paz. Was an honor. http://t.co/pkhROxn50P
- Note to self: Useful-looking guide to deep learning for NLP: http://t.co/HDNZsHvCPK
- More fine work by @derekwillis https://t.co/3qWKWTafmn
- @will_koper Haha. Me too.
- RT @CIRonline: Save the date! On 8/7 we're holding TechRaking III w/ @Google. Theme: Mining the news. Details coming: #datanerds #journalism
- @meghannCIR You're gonna be like Kanye, but for South America. HUGE.
- FYI @CIRonline, I used On Shaky Ground as an example in a South American training class and now it's going to be featured on Bolivian TV.
- @YKondoS @blejman is your man. He can give you all the info you need! Otherwise, the website is here: http://t.co/s7C4uR8z2L
- @tiffehr Haha. Right on schedule. Glad they dared not defy the iCal.
- @jmm @ryanpitts @miguelpaz Check out HuffPo's production implementation too: https://t.co/GRw82Bawtc
- @miguelpaz The campaign data standardization project we talked about: https://t.co/ZuY8MLb8k1
- "I understand culture. I am the nucleus." http://t.co/Mph2VdYwGM
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Info
- Assistant editor, interactive news at The New York TimesNewspapers | Greater New York City Area, USExperience
- Mar 2013 - PresentAssistant editor, interactive news / The New York Times
- Jan 2013 - PresentAdjunct Professor / University of Missouri
I am remotely teaching a course in advanced data journalism for the Missouri School of Journalism during the spring 2013 semester.
- Mar 2009 - PresentFounding Partner / Hot Type Consulting
Our company provides award-winning Web development and technical services to media clients, from small startups to international companies. Projects include building and launching the Texas Tribune alongside in-house staff; advising U.S. elections data strategy for a major international wire service; and serving as lead developer and project manager for clients including Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. and WNYC public radio.
- Aug 2009 - Jan 2013Director of technology; investigative reporter / Center for Investigative Reporting
After one year on the politics beat I was promoted to director of technology, where I led a 10-person team responsible for technology strategy, data journalism and website engineering. Projects and duties included covering the 2010 California statewide elections; building an iPhone application and analyzing data for an award-winning series that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; integrating teams and technologies after the merger of CIR and the Bay Citizen; and building a modern open source culture and infrastructure.
- Nov 2008 - Jul 2009Reporter / The Des Moines Register
I worked primarily as an investigative reporter and routinely performed complex analyses as the newspaper's data specialist. Projects included a series that used identified gaping holes in state air pollution monitoring systems, which won two of the state's highest journalism awards in 2010.
- Dec 2007 - Dec 2008Adjunct professor / University of Houston
I taught computer-assisted and investigative reporting for two semesters at the University of Houston.
- Sept 2006 - Nov 2008Reporter / Houston Chronicle
As the newsroom data specialist, I applied technology and quantitative methods to problems in journalism and trained others to do the same. I contributed to staff coverage of Hurricane Ike that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and investigations I did into county government helped spur unprecedented ethics reforms.
- Oct 2004 - Aug 2006Data analyst / National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting
- Aug 2001 - May 2006General assignment reporting intern / Internships and student publications
I worked as a general assignment reporting intern at six newspapers: The Boston Globe, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the St. Petersburg Times, the Omaha World-Herald, the Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald and the Sun Newspapers group of Minneapolis.
Education-
2001 - 2006University of Missouri-Columbia
Additional Information-
Interests:Data science, machine learning, natural language processing, statistics,
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Repositories
- Class materials, handouts and examples for J4462/7462 (Advanced Data Journalism) at the University of Missouri, Spring 2013 semester.5 forks / 11 watchers / Pushed Apr 06, 13
- Various documents and code examples for NICAR 2013 presentations.9 forks / 28 watchers / Pushed Mar 01, 13
- An experiment to standardize individual donor names in campaign finance data using simple graph theory and machine learning.7 forks / 27 watchers / Pushed Jan 25, 13
- LSH based high dimensional clustering for sets and points2 watchers / Pushed Dec 28, 12
- Parser and standardizer for politician, individual and organization names./ Pushed Dec 10, 12
- Slides and supporting material for Chase's data journalism ignite talk from NewsFoo 2012.4 forks / 23 watchers / Pushed Nov 29, 12
- News app for the Nov. 9-11 training at Mizzou.1 fork / 1 watcher / Pushed Nov 13, 12
- Our fork of django-project-templates, which includes fabric scripts and basic setup for Heroku apps./ Pushed Oct 26, 12
- A project to demonstrate maximum entropy models for extracting quotes from news articles in Python.10 forks / 11 watchers / Pushed Aug 27, 12
- Simple implementations of data science tools for use by newspaper reporters.2 forks / 15 watchers / Pushed Jun 04, 12
- Code accompanying the book "Machine Learning for Hackers"1 watcher / Pushed Mar 17, 12
- Simple django application for asynchronous tracking of events.4 forks / 7 watchers / Pushed Dec 18, 11
- Implementation of a pairwise document similarity algorithm using MapReduce.1 fork / 7 watchers / Pushed Nov 15, 11
- Convert PDF to HTML without losing text or format.223 forks / 2424 watchers / Pushed Jun 17, 13
- Code accompanying the book "Machine Learning for Hackers"286 forks / 689 watchers / Pushed Dec 22, 12
- Simple implementations of data science tools for use by newspaper reporters.2 forks / 15 watchers / Pushed Jun 04, 12
- Code accompanying the book "Machine Learning for Hackers"1 watcher / Pushed Mar 17, 12
- 1 fork / 3 watchers / Pushed Dec 28, 11
- Implementation of a pairwise document similarity algorithm using MapReduce.1 fork / 7 watchers / Pushed Nov 15, 11
