Faces of the Decade

The Nation's most talked about people

SAMBHAV JAIN | DECEMBER 2019

Discover the most captivating people of the 2010s. This interactive timeline allows you to scroll through the faces of those most referenced in — excluding sitting US presidents* — across four key categories:
Arts & Culture, Business & Tech., OpEd/Opinion, and World News.
This timeline is generated from an analysis of all NYT articles from the past decade. Navigate to the methodology.

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Data & Methodology

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 "Busines 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.
Acknowledgements:
Daniel Shiffman - Tutorials on using the New York Times API.
The Pudding articles have always been a great inspiration and I've learnt a lot from their storytelling techniques.

*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.