Writing & investigations

Cryptographic Amnesia

A cultural history of cryptography — from wartime instrument to civil-liberties cause to the ambient infrastructure no one thinks about.

How Much Is a Verification Worth?

What a single identity verification is actually worth, costed from the data.

America's Most-Sued Companies Don't Exist

Surfaced 8,747 federal mass-defendant cases from the RECAP archive to show how mass-litigation targets businesses that don't really exist.

Anatomy of a Shell Company

What a shell company actually looks like — and how shared addresses, agents, and officers expose the networks behind them.

Wyoming's Corporate Boom

The state structures that make anonymous business ownership a paid feature.

No Branches, No Verification, No Problem

How a Colorado licensing carve-out concentrated more than half of all crypto-named money-service-business registrants in a single state.

Enigma Government Archive

Launch of the Enigma Government Archive — 1,000+ validated public datasets; owned the launch content stack end to end.

The Geography of Corporate America

A jurisdictional map of where corporate America incorporates, and why.

Fonts

The annual state of web typography, measured across millions of sites.

Iceberg Sensemaking: A Process Model for Critical Data Analysis and Visualization

A process model for the hidden, below-the-waterline work of critical data analysis, reframed through an interpretivist lens.

The Drawbridge Model of Cryptographic Communication

Dirty Data in the Newsroom: Comparing Data Preparation in Journalism and Data Science

An ethnography of how journalists and data scientists actually clean data.

Table Scraps: An Actionable Framework for Multi-Table Data Wrangling from an Artifact Study of Computational Journalism

Knowing Together: An Experiment in Collaborative Photogrammetry

A collaborative 3D-imaging experiment in capturing people, together.

The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography

Walter Benjamin and the Question of Print in Media History

Newsrooms Are Making Leaking Easier — and More Secure — Than Ever

Guide to SecureDrop: An Emerging Platform for Secure and Anonymous Communication in Newsrooms

The first published study of the SecureDrop whistleblowing platform.

Teaching Data and Computational Journalism

A curriculum report that shaped data-journalism programs at 116 schools.

A Crucial Skill That Most J-Schools Aren't Teaching

A Brief Introduction to Impact: 'The Meme Font'