April 12, 2024, 1:28 p.m.
Album GOAT Rankings, Well-being Data on Teens into Adulthood, and the Flipbook Experiment
New visual essays from The Pudding
The Pudding
The Pudding is a publication for visual essays. You may have stumbled upon some of our projects, such as Women’s Pockets are Inferior, How Bad is Your Spotify or Apple Music?, or A People Map of the US.
We have *three* new updates that we are excited to share with you!
[Essay] How Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list changed from 2003 to 2020. We examined every album and voter from Rolling Stone’s three-decade survey.
[Interactive] The Flipbook Experiment: Help draw the longest flipbook animation ever. It’s like the telephone game, but visual.
[6-min Video] Watch hundreds of teenagers grow up into adults and see how their childhood experiences affect their life outcomes: Alvin Chang uses longitudinal survey data to trace the experiences of hundreds of teenagers.
As always, thanks a ton for continuing to subscribe and allowing us to share our work with your inbox. Special shout-out to Patreon subscribers; your support means a lot!
Pro-tip: Team members Michelle, Matt, and Jan have free, open-to-the-public office hours! We want to share what we’ve learned, and empower people to make great stuff of their own, so come chat with us! Grab a calendar slot here.
Watch hundreds of teenagers grow up into adults and see how their lives turn out
(This project has two forms: a 6-minute video and interactive visual essay)
Alvin Chang, the project’s author, kept a daily diary while producing this project. As a journalism professor, he noticed how small life events derailed students’ lives. Often it was small—things like getting sick and missing a few classes. But that could quickly snowball into losing a job, getting overwhelmed with school work, or experiencing a mental health crisis. And for some, that meant dropping out of school.
Alvin uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to explore this idea. He’s able to trace the paths of hundreds of teenagers starting in 1997—first dates, SAT scores, college plans, first jobs, incomes, first time they cohabitate, their health, their happiness, their families, and so much more—to see how their childhood experiences affected their life outcomes.
Your childhood can impact your adulthood, but looking at the data makes the stark inequalities even more visible.
What makes an album the greatest of all time?
Three years ago, Matt came across a Google Sheet created by Chris Eckert, detailing Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums 2003 v 2012 v. 2020. It was fascinating to see what fell from the ranking each decade (e.g., AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”), as well as what was added (Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly”).
In this project, Matt and contributor Chris Dalla Riva go deeper on the data, pointing to different trends that account for the decade-to-decade shifts. They also examine the judges who determined the rankings: all 269 people in 2003 and the 336 purportedly more diverse voters in 2020.
The Flipbook Experiment
Did you ever make flipbook animations as a kid? We put together an experiment to try and make the longest (and collaborative!) one ever. We’ll share some preliminary results and findings soon, but it is still open for contributions. Join the fun and come doodle for a minute.
With the release of Beyonce’s country album, we revisited the data from our analysis of over 180,000 songs played on 29 country radio stations across 19 days. This video on our Instagram shows how rare it is for Black women artists to be played on country radio.
The First Summer Cohort!
It’s been years since The Pudding conducted an internship. This year, we’re trying something different: a summer fellowship for aspiring visual storytellers to author a project on The Pudding.
Ahmed Bendaly, Vivian Li, and Andrew Park will be participating, and each of them pitched project ideas that we’re excited to nurture this summer.
If you missed the cohort announcement, you can read the application instructions here.
Quick asides!
Have a cool essay idea that you want to make? Check out our pitch guidelines.
Want to hire our team to produce data-led, visual stories? Check out our sister studio, Polygraph.
#stuffwelove at The Pudding
Here’s also some special links that are regularly shared on our Friends of The Pudding slack-channel (get access via Patreon)!
NatureScore - a quantitative attempt to calculate the positive impact of nature on a neighborhood. The model uses “land use classifications, park areas and features, tree canopy cover estimates, air pollution, noise levels, artificial light at night values, buildings, roads, impervious surfaces.”
An Analysis of “Mario Kart 8” Karts - this project makes sense of the 25,704 different kart-builds for Mario Kart 8.
Parallel Lives - a timeline that displays famous historical figures who lived concurrently in a given year.
Thank you subscribers! And take care! — Matt & Russell