Aporia

απορία — a state of puzzlement, the moment before understanding

Visual essays that use data to reopen questions we thought were settled. Each piece is built around our own open-source tools — chronowords and kenon — and designed to be read, scrolled, and explored.

These are not dashboards. They are arguments made with data, written to be read from beginning to end.


Essays

Nixon portrait — split word cloud of public and private vocabulary
Computational Psycholinguistics

The great modern crimes are public crimes

Does power change a person — or reveal them? We applied Big Five personality analysis to the public speeches and private writings of seven American leaders. Lincoln was the same man in both rooms. Nixon was two different people. Kissinger knew exactly what he was doing.

Lincoln · Nixon · Kissinger · Scrollytelling + Chart.js work in progress