Introducing ... Data Is Plural: The Podcast.

(Music by Nikhil Sonnad.)

This episode’s guest is Vikram Oberoi, whose atariemailarchive.org was featured in the Sept. 21, 2022 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Vikram explains how he discovered the emails (originally published by former Atari engineer Jed Margolin), their backstory, how they became a yearslong obsession for him, how he processed them into structured data, how organized them into threads, and what he learned along the way.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• atariemailarchive.org
• Specific threads:
  • On CC’ing
  • On building a spellchecker
  • On royalties
  • Jed venting about inventory data
• Vikram’s structured dataset of the emails
• Vikram’s blog post describing how he built the site
• “My Vax Mail, Memos, and Status Reports from Atari/Atari Games 1982-1992,” the page on Jed Margolin’s website containing the raw mail files
• The 2012 Kotaku post that caught Vikram’s attention
• A picture of a VAX mainframe

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.

This episode’s guest is Irena Hwang, whose analysis of salmonella genetic data was featured in the Nov. 17, 2021 edition of the Data Is Plural newsletter. Irena explains how she used the data to inform ProPublica’s investigation into a major salmonella outbreak, how the gene sequences are collected, how to access them, how to make sense of them, and what she learned along the way.

Relevant and mentioned links:

• NCBI’s Pathogen Detection database
• ProPublica’s investigation
• Irena’s behind-the-scenes explanatory article
• A tool developed by ProPublica to help you when shopping for poultry
• Wikipedia’s entry on next-generation DNA sequencing, also known as “massive parallel sequencing”
• A definition of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), from the National Library of Medicine

Theme music by Nikhil Sonnad.