👋 hi, I’m basile

I am a coder-journalist who has left the newsroom behind in order to focus on different practices of data analysis and visualisation.

Update Jan. 2021: I am looking for freelance/contract work from September 2021 onwards!

Contact

✉️ basile-at-basilesimon-dot-fr 🔐 PGP
📞 +49 172 253 9671 (Signal/Telegram)
🔗 @basilesimon on some social platforms

Past employment

My journalism career started in the UK, where I worked for large broadcasters, newspapers, and agencies.

I also co-founded Airwars, a non-profit monitoring organisation exposing the harm done to civilians by air conflicts.

Selected projects/stories

General election 2019 results

Conception and design of the page and of the back-end interfacing with the results' provider. The whole page is modular and can be re-built in various ways by the clients.

Read all about it

Global Witness' "Pipedown" map

A short contract bringing to life the dataset on which GW's campaign was based, modular once again, and published both from the CMS and as a standalone. One of my largest Svelte.js projects.

Read all about it

The Brexit challenge of the next PM

A data-driven experiment looking at how Brexit splits the Tories. Don't miss the even-nerdier, machine learning-driven complement.

Read all about it

Iran's commitments under threat

Long-term monitoring of Iran's nuclear commitments, including their often misunderstood space race efforts. Automation of the parsing of the nuclear agency's reports.

90% of all British crimes are unsolved

Collaboration with the Data team to bring this multi-week exclusive analysis of police data to life in just over two days.

Brexit's Super Saturday

Quick turnaround (one afternoon) of a summary ahead of an extraordinary parliamentary session, building on visualisation templates we established.

Poorer constituencies favoured Five Star

An election results analysis of socio-economic factors that may have swung the Italian vote in 2018. Modelled in R, prepared ahead of time, and published the following day, on deadline.

I turn datasets into long term stories

Since the beginning of western airstrikes against Isis, Airwars.org has held militaries across the world to account for the harm they have caused to civilians. This work was made possible through the creation of a dataset collating military reports and OSINT investigations into claims of civilian harm. This project and stories have spanned years and led to meaningful change, not only raising the bar for public accountability of their governments but holding those in power in check.

During my time at Reuters we published several pieces about the unraveling of the nuclear deal between Iran and the so-called P5+1. I created a dataset that tracked the progress of Iran’s commitments to the deal in terms of its efforts to enrich Uranium which underpinned much of the reporting.

I’ve covered the (never-ending) Brexit saga for a number of years and devised bespoke maps of the British political spectrum on the topic. This has involved manipulating the raw voting records and feeding the results to a simple machine learning clustering algorithm.

I specialise in reactive data-visualisation

For several newsrooms I have covered (more than enough) elections. They are the bread and butter of news nerds’ work and involve standing up both a back end and front end which picks up results as they come in and redraws charts and analysis live (as well as without forcing the reader to refresh).

Think of big dashboards of live data, for lack of a better image.

I am also familiar with building projects which involve readers directly engaging with content, like our survey of knowledge of modern slavery in Britain, our analysis of changing attitudes to divorce, or our 2017 Budget calculator.

I support investigative journalism work

Part of my time is spent working as a technologist and advisor to investigative journalism organisations, such as Global Witness and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

Some of that work consists of code reviews, data audits, and system administration. Out of the trenches, I advise on infrastructure and systems architecture to support the work of these teams.

I read about (and would give a kidney to report on) the following topics:

Open source work

Fortunately I was able to open-source some of the work I have done:

Academic work

I had the privilege of teaching the Advanced Data and Coding module on the MA in Interactive Journalism course at City University. We ran through an introduction to programming, statistical methods, R data analysis and modelling with ggplot.

All my teaching notes are available on Github.

I have done some studying myself:

Talks & awards

Kantar Information is Beautiful 2019, long list for:

Society for News Design, Awards of Excellence 2019

Talks

Hackathons