Chris Wilson
Phone (434) 242-9728 | E-mail christopher.e.wilson@gmail.com
1375 Fairmont St. NW #309 | Washington, DC 20009
Overview
I'm a hybrid reporter-programmer with six years in professional journalism and four years in online development. My specialty is coding editorial multimedia projects based on large datasets. I can complete every stage of a project, from collecting and storing data, composing the code to analyze it, conducting interviews based on the findings, writing accompanying articles, and developing user-friendly, interactive visualizations to make the data come alive. My projects range from serious investigative work to whimsical means of representing otherwise opaque topics.
Work Experience
Yahoo News, Jan. 2012 - present
Editor
- Develop editorial interactives and data-driven reporting projects.
Slate Magazine, Dec. 2007 - Nov. 2011
Senior Editor, Director of Slate Labs
- Developed several dozen multimedia features, such as maps, reader contests, and data visualizations.
- Founded Slate Labs, a sister site for experimental web projects.
- Wrote over 100 articles on technology, politics, and culture, including an expose on how Saddam Hussein was captured using social network theory.
- Winner of the 2010 Media Vanguard Award for Best New Web-Publishing Idea Factory
U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 2007 - Dec. 2007
- Founded the News Desk blog and wrote several dozen articles as a reporter on the National Desk
Congressional Quarterly, Jan. 2006 - Dec. 2006
- Developed visualizations of Congressional and industry data.
Washingtonian Magazine, Sept. 2005 - July 2007
- Wrote longform science-related features for the magazine.
Technical Skills
| Languages: | Javascript, Python, PHP, Actionscript, Flash, Flex, Octave |
| Data visualization: | Raphael, Flare, Processing, and Protoviz. |
| Databases: | MySQL, SQLite, RDF-based (such as DBPedia) |
| Markups/data formats: | HTML/HTML5, XML, JSON, RDF |
| Platforms: | Django (on which I run Slate Labs) |
| Operating systems: | Linux, OSX (with Darwin), Windows |
Education
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, Va.) 2001-2005
B.A., English; Concentration in physics; GPA: 3.59 (total), 3.80 (major)
Echols Scholar (Honors program for top 8.5% of Arts & Sciences students)
Standford Machine Learning Class (advanced track)
Miscellaneous
Cofounder of AnalyzeWords.com, a site that uses natural language processing to determine your personality on Twitter.
Short story "The Dry Season" nominated for the Pushcart Prize.