Last March Katz was a grad student in the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University and had recently decided he wanted to look more closely at an interesting set of data he’d seen 10 years prior, the Harvard Dialect Survey. The Harvard Dialect Survey maps created by researchers in 2003. Katz’s personal journey to the Times is a fun one, but the story of the technology behind the popular project is just as good. “What I didn’t realize is that that is essentially a lot of what they do at Times graphics, so it was really a perfect fit.” “I’d always had an interest in data visualization and finding a way of communicating results graphically,” he said. “I’d enjoyed the news as a consumer,” Katz said, “but I'd never really pictured myself as being a part of the journalism world.” That’s not the whole story of course, but it’s the rough run-up to how Josh Katz ended up an intern at the Times last fall and eventually created (with graphics editor Wilson Andrews) the newspaper’s most popular piece of content in 2013 - “ How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk.” Then apply to grad school and while you're there dig in to some intriguing data that Harvard researchers had published 10 years prior, apply some stats and smart algorithms, post your work online, then wait for The New York Times to call. Well, for starters, study or consider careers in politics, law, and philosophy before eventually deciding that statistics is for you. How do you create the most popular piece of content of the year at one of the nation’s most prestigious news outlet? NYT's most popular piece of content in 2013 - “ How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” generates a personalized dialect map based upon user responses compared to data from more than 350,000 survey responses collected in 2013.
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