Who Merits the Longest NY Times Obituaries?

Using the NY Times Archive API, journalist Ted Alcorn built Below the Fold, a dashboard through which you can explore the last 25 years of Times coverage: 2.2 million articles containing 1.5 billion words. You can slice and dice this data in a bunch of different ways — it’s a fantastic resource.

One of the site’s sections is about obituaries. From that data, Alcorn produced this infographic of whose obits contained the highest word count:

As you can see, it’s a lot of world leaders, religious leaders, politicians, and white men. There only appear to be five women on the list. Notable non-politicians include Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Muhammad Ali, and Charles Schulz.

The whole dashboard is fun/enlightening to explore.

• infoviz
• journalism
• NY Times
• obituaries
• Ted Alcorn