Accomplished digital educator Jonathan Soma, Knight Chair in Data Journalism, also directs the LEDE Program at Columbia University.

Soma focuses on making unapproachable data accessible. He has made maps, processed data, and crowdsourced stories with ProPublica, WNYC, The New York Times, and others. He specializes in building tools and curricula to help newsrooms do faster, better work.

His contributions to open source software include tools to reverse-engineer algorithmic recommendation systems, manage content management systems from Google Sheets, install Python, perform network analysis, and many more. He has also published a wide variety of
freely-available open-source educational material, including Python’s Not (Just) For Unicorns, Data Science for Journalism, Fancy GitHub, and the Data Viz Design Guide.

In 2009 he helped create Big Apple Ed, a web application that crunched NYC school data, which was awarded third place in New York City’s first annual Big Apps contest. Since then, Soma’s personal projects — analyzing the Japanese census, MTA travel times and more — have been featured everywhere from Gawker to The New York Times Style section. In 2010 he cofounded the Brooklyn Brainery, a community-driven recreational school.

Soma, who earned his B.A. in Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia, has guest lectured around the world on machine learning and data visualization and has been a recent speaker at NICAR, SciCAR and Computation+Journalism. He teaches classes in Data Visualization and the Data-Driven Newsroom.