Saurabh Datar
Data journalist
Hello, I’m a data journalist/developer. I was previously at WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, the Boston Globe, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. My work has also appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News. I was also a reporter and writer in India.
I use computational methods to analyze data and write both words and code to tell compelling stories.
Projects I’ve worked on have won awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2021, IRE award, Philip Meyer award and the OJA Knight Award for Public Service, among others.
Here are some of my clips.
Data/Graphics
Open-source projects
Crime in India
I took India’s dense, 600-page annual crime reports, parsed the data and built an interactive website using Frozen Flask. I believe it's the only website that allows you to track crimes in over 50 cities in India. I even found a mistake in the way the data was recorded — rates for crimes against women were calculated using total population. I wrote cleaning scripts in Pandas to correct this error. The code is on Github.
Open Elections
I am a contributor to the Open Elections project, an open source project that aims to provide processed election results. I wrote Python scripts to download result files for Georgia and New Jersey, clean them, and produce clean CSV files for public use. The code is on Github.