Hey gang,
I’m Jordon Brown, and I’m in my final semester (there must be some wood to knock on around here somewhere) at grad school getting my Master’s in Digital Media. My undergrad was in film from Southeast Missouri, which is about two hours south of St. Louis, where I grew up. After spending a year in LA and hating it, I moved to Austin and have been loving it here in central Texas ever since. My first experiences with coding came last semester in Jacie’s class, although I have been running my own website for a number of years on a WordPress platform, but I did not build the original design, and only had really played around with the Widgets and menus.
Having attended SXSWi last year as part of the SXTXState team, I got to see a lot of the potential for data journalism first hand. Even before my experiences at SXSWi, I was still very much drawn to data storytelling. I fully admit to having a huge crush on Ezra Klein and all things Vox media.
With that in mind, I often look to them for inspiration when I can’t think of how to tackle a story. I was struck by the music registry we went over in class a few weeks ago and wondered if there was a way to visualize it. Specifically, after seeing a heat map of Tweets during the Super Bowl I really wanted to play around with a visualization of music in Austin. What types of bands play where and how can that be represented on a map. Dividing musical genres by color and then having a map of Austin venues showing who plays what music most often would be both interesting and compelling.
I’m very much looking forward to this semester and excited to work with data and do my Ezra proud.