by Sambhav Jain
DESCRIPTION
Discover the most captivating people of the 2010s. This interactive timeline allows you to scroll through the faces of those most referenced in The New York Times (excluding sitting US presidents) across four key categories:
Arts & Culture, Business & Tech., OpEd/Opinion, and World News.
PROCESS
Using the New York Times Archive API, I downloaded all articles from 2010 - 2019. I then aggregated the number of citations for every person (recorded as "persons" tag in the NYT metadata) for every month, broken down by the news category the article belonged to. I combined similar categories under "Section Name" and "News Desk", to get the maximum number of citations, and finally ranked every person across these combined categories ("Arts and Culture", "OpEd/Opinion", "World" and "Business and Technology"). After removing sitting US presidents and NYT editors (who were also part of the "persons" tag), from the analysis, I filtered for the highest ranked people for every month in the last decade across these categories. I then used the Wikipedia API to get image thumbnails and description for every shortlisted personality.
*United States Presidents who held office during this decade are excluded to provide more nuanced cultural insights. In reality, sitting US presidents were the most frequently referenced people in The NYT across all news categories, regardless of the newsworthy events that occurred.