Anastasia's Portfolio

Hi, I'm Anastasia

I am a data reporter at Newsday,
a co-founder of the School of Data Kyrgyzstan
and Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia
See some of my projects below

Data reporter at Newsday

See how George Santos spent more than $103,000 on restaurants, hotels and flights

Technologies used: Spreadsheets, Flourish

George Santos-tied PACs gave $185,000 to Nassau GOP

Technologies used: Python, Google Sheets, Flourish

How money flows between Santos-tied PACs and Nassau GOP

Technologies used: Python, Google Spreadsheets, Flourish

Data fellowship at The Marshall Project

What You Need to Know About the Rise in U.S. Mass Shootings: data journalism piece putting the recent mass shootings in a historical perspective.

Technologies used: Spreadsheets, Python (pandas, numpy), Observable, d3.

Rifles, Tasers and Jails: How Cities and States Spent Billions of COVID-19 Relief

Technologies used: Python, Google Sheets, Airtable, Observable, Datawrapper

How coding can change the very journalism we do

From faster, replicable work to multi-story databases, here’s what I’m most excited about after my fellowship with a data team

My experiments with coding for journalism

Final project for Lede Program at Columbia Graduate Journalism School. This is a digital memorial for those people who we lost as as society due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It commemorates their legacy and lives, while the story of the death toll is unfolding on the background.

Tech used: Beautiful Soup for scraping Wikipedia, Pandas for data cleaning and analysis, Flourish, d3 and scrollama for visualization

One of the experiments in the aftermath of Lede program: automating creation of maps in Datawrapper using the python library and command line gif maker tool.

Technologies used: Python, pandas library for data cleaning and data analysis, matplotlib for data visualization, API, Datawrapper, command line gif maker.

Re-creating the viz of my Lede classmate, Chris Gilligan, in d3 from the scratch!

Technologies used: Observable, d3

Capstone project from my experience in Kyrgyzstan:

‘The Crack’ is a multimedia data-driven project that draws a comprehensive picture of the poor state of school infrastructure in Kyrgyzstan. For the first time, journalists have combined all the data available on the topic.

The result is shocking: between a quarter and a third of schools in the country are in deplorable condition. At least 300,000 children study in these schools every day.
The project is a longread data story, an open database, series of reports and a data-driven game. These were cross-published by 9 media outlets in 3 languages.

This is a project initiated at the ‘Data Storytelling’ course at the Master Program in Journalism at the American University of Central Asia and performed by the students of the course led by the course professor, Anastasia Valeeva.

Technologies used: Google Suite (shared folders and collaborative documents) and Zoom for project management, Python for scraping, Google Sheets for data cleaning and data analysis.

For data visualization we used Flourish and d3 (scrollama library). For the layout, we used Tilda and Github. For the data game, we used Google Sheets, Figma and Javascript.

Impact: this series of reports cross-published by several media across the country have pushed the topic into a public discussion. The story received a special prize at the national investigative journalism awards in Kyrgyzstan.

President’s office reacted to the story by reaching out to journalists and asking for additional information.
The story was followed up by researchers and analysts (Social Innovation Lab Kyrgyzstan and KG Analytics) and relevant NGOs (‘Foundation for Education Initiatives Support’ and ‘Child rights defenders’ league public foundation).

Data Stories I mentored and edited:

'Millions to doctors: the lack of transparency in the Ministry of Health spending'. Part of a series about Covid-19 spending

Open data, Google Sheets, Flourish

'No choice: why schoolchildren from poorer families have test scores too low to enter a university'

Open data, Extracting data from PDFs, Google Sheets, Regression analysis, Datawrapper

Data reveals that 96% of people who find themselves before a Kyrgyz court receive a guilty verdict (unless they are state officials)

Scraping PDFs, Regex, Pivot tables, Datawrapper

'Dependent country: Kyrgyzstan survives on money made by migrant workers, but it doesn’t know how to spend it'

Open data, Google Sheets, Datawrapper

'MPs always agree and often skip the sessions'
Data analysis shows that bills in the Parliament are approved with an average of 98% of the vote

Scraping PDFs, Pivot tables, Datawrapper

'On a public display. How women in Kyrgyzstan get exposed to domestic violence and why perpetrators avoid punishment'

Open data, Google Sheets, Flourish

Data Projects I led:

For three years I was a lead mentor at the Data Journalism Fellowship run by Internews Kyrgyzstan. We published 52 stories, many of them getting into top 10 DDJ links by GIJN.

In 2018, a story got in the IJNet's list of important innovative reporting. In 2021, my mentees brought the first SIGMA award to Kyrgyzstan.

I am a co-founder of School of Data Kyrgyzstan, a public foundation that promotes data literacy and data-driven decision making through education, community building and publications.

One of our flagship events is LAMPA, international data journalism conference in Russian language. It is running online since 2020.

In 2017-2021 I led a data journalism concentration at the American University of Central Asia, teaching both at bachelor and master levels.

One of our side projects with students, Data Art Carpet, won a special prize (jury choice) at the Moscow Dataviz Awards 2021.

Pieces I wrote:

Longread on building a data journalism hypothesis for Datajournalism.com, co-authored with Eva Constantaras.

Overview of data journalism development and practices in CIS countries. For Jrnlst.ru's special issue on data journalism

Reflection on the most effective ways to introduce students to data, for Datajournalism.com

'Is Russia Today a legitimate fact-checker? We did the math'. For Poynter.org, co-authored with Alexios Mantzarlis

Piece on Russian media strategies on Telegram, in the light of its troubles with the country’s communications regulator. For Nieman.org

In-depth study on how open data is used for investigative storytelling in Russia. Conducted during the fellowship at RISJ, University of Oxford

Series of interviews with people whose loved ones died by euthanasia. For Esquire Russia

Breaking news reporting about how Brussels is surviving the terrorist attacks. For Meduza.io

Report from the train carrying opposition leader Aleksey Navalny from Moscow to Kirov for the court session. For Opendemocracy.net