@dwillis
I teach data journalism at the University of Maryland, run OpenElections. Fan of WBB & test cricket. Posting obscure things about campaign finance, Congress & elections. https://github.com/dwillis https://thescoop.org
Just released at #NICAR26: CAROL Cleaner, which cleans up NTSB safety recommendation data to make it more useful for analysis, from @merrillcollege.bsky.social student Cat Murphy:
catelizabethmurphy.github.io/carol_cleane...
I don't know much about being a real programmer, but what little I've learned has mostly come from Jake.
Are you sorry, though?
It's time for NICAR-India
Come on by my #NICAR2026 talk Thursday with Tiasia Saunders about narrative analysis in R. schedules.ire.org/nicar-2026/#...
🔍 I'm pleased to announce the launch of archive.ire.org, a new AI-powered search engine unlocking the collective knowledge of Investigative Reporters and Editors members.
“Dear Derek Americans”
Now do Loving
I did an online class one summer and even though I loved the topic and the instructor was great it was a genuinely not good experience.
I actually went and looked at some of those and ... yeah
If you'll be around on Sunday morning there's a NICAR-L session where we can explore this!
If you're coming to #NICAR2026 this week, I've got a few sessions for you:
* Demoing the new IRE Resources Center with @palewi.re (Thu)
* Using LLMs to improve your archives (Sat)
* Tips for election coverage (Sat)
Will also be at the NICAR-L session on Sunday morning with some work.
Come along!
Do you mean the listserv or society in general?
Will be in Indy to watch things (also, you've picked UMD to beat Mich but it says Michigan).
WE'VE GOT 5000 WORDS ON THE BIG TEN TOURNAMENT RAAAAAAH
open.substack.com/pub/dreamb1g...
so far
Hired a month into Close’s tenure, Newnan became UCLA’s globe-trotter-in-chief, the assistant coach who would help make international recruiting a pillar of UCLA’s success. With 1,496 international players in the sport this year, according to the Sports Roster Data Project at the University of Maryland, Newnan’s early efforts to cultivate worldwide talent have positioned UCLA as one of the most trusted international pipelines in women’s college basketball.
Hey, that's our project mentioned in @theathletic.com last month:
github.com/Sports-Roste...
I thought Operations Epic Furry was the thing about litter boxes in schools?
"Got that social post ready to go?"
"Uh, I have two posts, not one."
"Just combine them."
"OK"
Just playing around with some NICAR-L archives:
Never thought I’d be nostalgic for the pseudo congressional debate in advance of the Iraq war in 2003, yet here we are.
Thank you for your service, Dan
For this administration I can see the utility.
In the NYT Magazine: Over 4 years, a dozen of my daughter’s current and former teammates (including my child) ruptured a combined 19 ACLs. Knee injuries have become a global crisis for teen girls. Yet we’ve known for 25 years how to reduce ACL tears. What went wrong? www.nytimes.com/2026/02/26/m...
It's worth reading Anthropic's blog post: www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...
I want to underscore that even if you hate Anthropic and uses of Artificial Intelligence, it is important to ensure the lines that they're laying out in this doc are not crossed, regardless of the tooling.
NEW EXTRA POINTS:
shared a guest post today that highlights the folks who keep the official stats...who are under WAY more pressure this time of year...and how that job is even hader/more important in the mass gambling era:
www.extrapointsmb.com/p/the-hidden...
Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs shows how easily pseudonymous users can now be re-identified from unstructured text alone.
When discussing our EJMR paper at NBER SI 2023 Catherine Tucker argued that rising compute would soon erode online anonymity. The future may already be here.
That's my union.
In a Pennsylvania state House special election yesterday, the Democratic candidates won with less than 7% turnout, per the county election board. In a district of 60,000+ people with 32,000 voters, just 2,250 decided the outcome. This was a race that could have flipped the chamber.
