Dylan Freedman
Hi! I’m Dylan, a full-stack software engineer and journalist. I strive
to code new tools to help journalists and the public.
I work at The Washington Post as a lead engineer on the Elections
Platforms team. This team is part of the greater newsroom engineering
team, which builds tools, graphics, and data pipelines to support the
newsroom.
Previously, I worked at MuckRock, where I led development of journalism technology platform DocumentCloud, and at Google on the Machine Perception team. I’ve taught data journalism
and studied computational journalism, computer science, and music.
To get in touch, feel free to reach out at freedmand@gmail.com.
Projects
I pursue many projects on and off work. Here are some highlights. For
reporting work, see Media below.
Poly
Website: poly.dev
Poly is a new programming language for the web I’m currently working on as a
personal project. The language is in early stages and is designed to compile
to full web applications in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Semantra
Website: github.com/freedmand/semantra
Semantra is a multipurpose tool for semantically searching documents. Query
by meaning rather than just by matching text. The tool, made to run on the
command line, analyzes specified text and PDF files on your computer and
launches a local web search application for interactively querying them. The
purpose of Semantra is to make running a specialized semantic search engine
easy, friendly, configurable, and private/secure.
Website: github.com/freedmand/textra
Textra is a command-line tool for Mac OS to convert images, PDFs, and audio
files to text. Leveraging Apple’s APIs, Textra is able to perform OCR
(optical character recognition) and audio transcription entirely on-device.
The tool has flexible options and a colorful output. It requires Mac OS 13+.
Crosswalker
Website: crosswalker.washingtonpost.com
Crosswalker is a general purpose tool for joining columns of text that don’t
perfectly match. It features a custom matching algorithm to populate initial
predictions and a spreadsheet-like interface for refining. Crosswalker was
built at the Washington Post and has many applications, but was designed for
the purpose of matching precinct names released on election day to past
elections as quickly as possible to power the Post’s election night model.
It is open source.
FastFEC
Website: washingtonpost.com/fastfec
FastFEC is a command-line tool and library for parsing U.S. campaign finance
data quickly. It is written in C with a focus on being as performant and
memory-efficient as possible. FastFEC powers the parsing in the Washington
Post’s campaign finance pipeline and has helped with some
stories. The tool is open source and there is an online demo.
Covid Map
Website: covid19map.us
Covid Map is an interactive, explorable, and zoomable map of current and
historical COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States. The site utilizes deck.gl, a WebGL-based library for displaying large datasets, to performantly map
each county’s data. The data is sourced from the New York Times’ open source covid data. First published in March 2020, the site automatically pulls in data
updates every day using a custom Google Cloud functions workflow. Source code.
DataJourn
Course Website: datajourn.com
In fall 2019, I taught an undergraduate course called Data Journalism
at Temple University. The course is divided into three parts: data, visualization,
and code. Students learned how to 1) find datasets and analyze them using spreadsheets,
2) design on paper and create graphics in Figma, and 3) code basic HTML, JavaScript,
and CSS to put together interactive webpages.
Course content includes a visual guide on how pivot tables work, an interactive bridge-building game to learn HTML, and a Halloween-themed puzzle to find coding mistakes.
Ripple Plastic
Website: rippleplastic.com
Ripple Plastic is a virtual reality experience I created in conjunction with
award-winning photographer Mandy Barker and the Stanford Journalism Program. The interactive exploration highlights the growing plastic pollution in
the world’s oceans by juxtaposing plastic debris Barker photographed on
beaches with a guided narration.
I coded the experience using the A-Frame Web.VR framework (source code). Steps involved include 1) mapping 2D photoshop layers into 3D objects
using a customly designed Blender pipeline, 2) creating a layout algorithm
to place objects randomly on a sphere using a combination of Perlin noise
and Poisson-disc sampling, 3) coordinating production with fellow journalism
students, and 4) composing custom theme music for the experience. I wrote a blog post about the process. The experience premiered at the Our Plastic Ocean exhibition at Impressions Gallery, England in 2019.
Inferactive
Website: inferactive.org
Inferactive is an interactive data tool for finding insights and inferences
I made as part of my master’s thesis. The entirely web-based platform
features a four-step analysis and discovery flow: 1) upload CSV data or
select an example dataset, 2) refine by selecting columns to include/exclude
from a table/detail view, 3) view statistics and one-dimensional charts for
each data column, and 4) discover insights and trends in the data by viewing
a shuffleable assortment of auto-generated plots correlating two data
columns.
The project is written in Svelte and
geared for frontend performance and the ability to handle large datasets.
Sounds
Observable Notebook
“Sounds” is an interactive sound wave primer I wrote for fun in 2018. This
online computational essay guides readers through the basics of sound wave
theory. Part 2 delves into more experimental sound functions and 8-bit chiptunes.
Tapcompose
Website: tapcompose.com
“Auto-complete for music composition.” Tapcompose is a web app I built as
part of a Stanford course that lets anyone write sheet music, bar by bar,
with auto-generated suggestions. The web app features dynamic sheet music
generation and a synced playback bar, with sounds generated using the Web
Audio API in-browser. Source code. YouTube demo.
AudioSet
Website: research.google.com/audioset
AudioSet is a static website I designed at Google to showcase an ontology of
sound events and collection of over 2 million manually annotated YouTube
clips. The website presents all the YouTube clip thumbnails, dynamically
requesting more as the user scrolls using JSONP. I used Closure Templates to build reusable components for static pages. I also contributed to the paper behind the website, which was presented at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in New Orleans.
Sonority
Website: sonority.io
Sonority is an interactive visualization of the harmonic similarity between
all the Beatles’ songs. I built the graphic using D3.js. Using a custom Python processing script, I statically generated thousands
of audio clips representing the most aligned excerpt of each pair of songs.
This work was part of my undergraduate thesis which I presented at the 2015 International Society for Music Information Retrieval
(ISMIR) conference in Malaga, Spain.
1:46.45 — The Unbroken National High School 800m Record
For this report, I interviewed record-holder Michael Granville, whose 1996 race performance at the semifinals of the California State
Meet has yet to be matched. Beyond his running performance, the video
explores his relationship with his father who coached him and unearths
never-before-uploaded footage of the actual race. The video features
original music I composed in high school when I was an 800m athlete.
Elusive: Recording the Secret Lives of Bay Area Mountain Lions
Article in SFGate
In recent years, residents of the Santa Cruz mountains have organized social
media communities on Facebook to share trail camera footage of their wooded
backyards. The shared media reveals just how prevalent, and elusive,
mountain lions are in the bay area. I interviewed leaders of the social
media groups and produced a video report and article.
Fear meets Fire
Public Radio International (PRI) Article
An article I co-authored with Jackie Botts on the impact of the 2017 “Wine Country” fires on undocumented immigrants.
The article got picked up by PRI’s The World and features a written component
and video report.
Analysis of the 2016 Election Forecasts
Interactive Data Visualization
An independent news article and interactive data piece showcasing the different forecasts from primary
news outlets for the 2016 presidential election and how they differed from actual
election outcomes. Coded in vanilla JavaScript.
