faces of the decade

This interactive timeline allows you to scroll through the faces of those most referenced in The New YorkTimes — 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.

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 "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.
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.