Data Science


  • Evolution of a Plot: Better Data Visualization, One Step at a Time

    The goal of data visualization is to transform numbers into insights. However, default data visualization output often disappoints. Sometimes, the graph shows irrelevant data or misses important aspects; sometimes, the graph lacks context; sometimes, it’s difficult to read. Often, data practitioners “feel” that something isn’t right with the graph, but cannot pinpoint the problem. In this…

  • Network Science at Automattic: Mapping the Communities of WP.com — Methodology

    If you have read our analysis on the communities of WordPress.com and would like to know more about the methods behind it, then keep on reading! In this — slightly more technical — post, I will show how we constructed, filtered, projected, and clustered a network around WordPress.com users and blogs. Building the Network of WP.com People…

  • Intro to Search: Anatomy of a search engine

    Welcome to the second post in our “Intro to Search”-series! Today, we’ll dig into the building blocks of search engines to give you an idea of just how we identify what posts to show readers using WordPress.com’s search tool. A (web) search engine connects users with relevant documents. This process generally has five main stages:…

  • Network Science at Automattic: Mapping the Communities of WP.com

    WordPress.com is home to hundreds of millions of sites, a place to produce and discover content. Logging in, you’re automatically taken to the Reader, where you’ll find a stream of posts from sites you follow or that we’ve recommended for you. You can like, reblog, or comment on these posts. If you’re inspired, you can choose to publish a…

  • Intro to Search: Initial Considerations

    This post is the first in a series about what we learned from developing search products for WordPress.com. In this post, I’ll give you a brief tour of some learnings from deploying search in the WordPress.com Reader. Improving this search tool to help our users find engaging articles they really like is an effort, and an…