Introducing ... Data Is Plural: The Podcast.

(Music by Nikhil Sonnad.)

This episode’s guest is Vikram Oberoi, whose atariemailarchive.org was featured in the Sept. 21, 2022 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Vikram explains how he discovered the emails (originally published by former Atari engineer Jed Margolin), their backstory, how they became a yearslong obsession for him, how he processed them into structured data, how organized them into threads, and what he learned along the way.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• atariemailarchive.org
• Specific threads:
  • On CC’ing
  • On building a spellchecker
  • On royalties
  • Jed venting about inventory data
• Vikram’s structured dataset of the emails
• Vikram’s blog post describing how he built the site
• “My Vax Mail, Memos, and Status Reports from Atari/Atari Games 1982-1992,” the page on Jed Margolin’s website containing the raw mail files
• The 2012 Kotaku post that caught Vikram’s attention
• A picture of a VAX mainframe

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.

This episode’s guest is Irena Hwang, whose analysis of salmonella genetic data was featured in the Nov. 17, 2021 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Irena explains how she used the data to inform ProPublica’s investigation into a major salmonella outbreak, how the gene sequences are collected, how to access them, how to make sense of them, and what she learned along the way.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• NCBI’s Pathogen Detection database
• ProPublica’s investigation
• Irena’s behind-the-scenes explanatory article
• A tool developed by ProPublica to help you when shopping for poultry
• Wikipedia’s entry on next-generation DNA sequencing, also known as “massive parallel sequencing”
• A definition of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), from the National Library of Medicine

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.

This episode’s guest is Pablo Medrano-Vizcaíno, whose dataset of roadkill in the Ecuadorian Andes was featured in the July 7, 2021 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Pablo describes why he studies roadkill, how he collected the data, the challenges of identifying species from their remains, and the future of road ecology research.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• “Geography of roadkills within the Tropical Andes Biodiversity Hotspot: Poorly known vertebrates are part of the toll,” Pablo’s 2021 paper with Santiago Espinosa, and its accompanying dataset.
• “Roadkill patterns in Latin American birds and mammals,” a 2022 paper by Pablo and co-authors examining data from 85 roadkill surveys.
• Red Ecuatoriana para el Monitoreo de Fauna Atropellada, Pablo’s citizen science project project, collecting roadkill data in Ecuador.
• Uku Pacha Ground Snake (Atractus Ukupacha) and Klebba's Snail-Eater (Dipsas klebbai), two previously-undescribed snake species found in Pablo and Santiago’s research.
• “Roadkill provide a novel way to sample an area’s animals,” an article in the Economist (behind paywall) discussing Pablo and Santiago’s work.

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.

This episode’s guest is Mattie Burkert, whose London Stage Database was featured in the Aug. 14, 2019 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Mattie sets the scene for 17th- and 18th-century theater performances, describes those performances’ eventful journey into bits and bytes, how the digital records were almost lost to history, and how she and collaborators recovered them.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• The London Stage Database
• “Recovering the London Stage Information Bank: Lessons from an Early Humanities Computing Project,” in which Mattie describes the data’s history in more detail
• “From Manual to Digital: Women's Hands and the Work of Eighteenth-Century Studies,” Mattie’s article about the outsourcing of the Information Bank’s digital transcription effort
• The London Stage Information Bank’s data and other files, as uploaded by Mattie and Brianna Marshall, including scanned images of the code (as found in Will Daland’s attic)
• Scans of “The London Stage, 1660-1800” reference books hosted by Hathi Trust
• Scan of “Index to the The London Stage, 1660-1800”, also hosted by Hathi Trust
• The 1971 article in “Computers and the Humanities” about the London Stage Information Bank
• Lawrence University’s Institute for Paper Chemistry, home to the mainframe used by London Stage Information Bank
• Data visualizations using the London Stage Database, in response to Nightingale x Data Is Plural data data visualization challenge

Mattie sends a special thanks to the University of Oregon’s Cameron Seright, who fixed some late-breaking website bugs just in time for this podcast release.

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.

This episode’s guest is Andy Wolf, former president of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, an international organization that, among other things, coordinates the giant pumpkin contests featured in the Oct. 26, 2022 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Andy explains what it takes to grow giant pumpkins, how they’re measured, how the community has evolved over the past century, and the pieces of data he tracks to keep his gourds growing strong.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• Weigh-off results from BigPumpkins.com
• Great Pumpkin Commonwealth
• Andy’s website, where you can buy his giant pumpkins
• Andy’s “Pumpkins 101” presentation
• “Little Valley man’s giant pumpkin is North American Champion,” an article about Andy’s top pumpkin in 2021
• The family tree for Andy’s latest giant pumpkin
• A history of giant pumpkin growing, from the Southern New England Giant Pumpkin Growers

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.

This episode’s guests are Jan Diehm and Amber Thomas, whose investigation into the sizes of jeans pockets was featured in the August 22, 2018 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Amber and Jan explain how they collected the data, how much smaller they found women’s jean pockets were than men’s, and what else they learned along the way.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• Jan and Amber’s pockets-investigation at The Pudding
• Data on all the measurements they took
• Their data collection sheet

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.

This episode’s guest is Illenin Kondo, one of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis economists behind the Income Distributions and Dynamics in America (IDDA) dataset and resource, featured in the October 11, 2023 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. (IDDA is a collaboration between the Census Bureau and the Minneapolis Fed.) Illenin explains how the researchers distilled two decades of confidential Census and IRS records into public statistics, what they mean by “income dynamics,” what makes the dataset special, and what they’ve learned from it so far.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• The project's landing page
• The project’s downloadable data
• The project’s data visualization tool
• An introduction to the statistics
• Articles with findings from the team’s research:
  • “The prosperity of high-earning foreign-born workers”
  • “The geographic divide in Native incomes and earnings”
  • “Inclusive recessions, inclusive recoveries?”
• Federal Statistical Research Data Centers

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.