Alyssa Fowers, Graphics Reporter | The Washington Post
Lightning Talk Title: How to build a dataset (a silly example for a serious topic)

Alyssa Fowers is a graphics and data reporter at The Washington Post who covers the economy and (on a good day) dogs. Before joining The Post in 2020, she studied at the University of Miami’s Interactive Media program.

LIGHTNING TALK TITLE: How to build a dataset (a silly example for a serious topic)

When your dataset doesn’t exist—or exists in fragments across many different sources—sometimes you have to build it yourself. This talk uses the unofficial holiday dataset from The Washington Post’s Department of Data as a humorous example to help think through the issues inherent to building any dataset: where the information comes from, whether to err on the side of over- or under-inclusion, how to evaluate your sources, how to automate (ish) deduplication, when to make judgment calls, how to build a rating scale, and more. By the end of the talk, the audience will understand how we know that the least-real holiday during C+J is the Festival of Unmentionable Thoughts, and how to apply that knowledge in more-substantive settings.

December 11, 2025 | Newman Alumni Center, University of Miami