Ben Kates (he/him)

I'm a data product engineer and data visualization expert living in Philadelphia, PA.

I specialize in:

  • Data Visualization Engineering & Design
  • Data Product Management
  • Web Development
  • Data Analysis & Dashboard Development
  • and more...
Learn more Send me a message

Projects

I love building data-driven experiences for analysis, decision-making, and storytelling. Here are some of my recent projects that showcase my skills in development, design, and product management.

Education-to-Workforce Framework Data Tool 🚀 Featured Project At the Urban Institute, I led the engineering of a large-scale data tool that allows users to explore the "Education to Workforce Framework" from Mathematica in states, counties, and Census tracts across the United States. With over 60 multi-year metrics and six categories of disaggregates in each geography, this project enables dynamic download of data visualizations and geospatial analysis with an intuitive interface and a robust component-based architecture.
  • SvelteKit
  • D3.js
  • Mapbox
  • Figma
  • html2canvas
  • Turf.js
  • Layer Cake
Project Link GitHub Repo
Getting a Good Job Depends More on Race and Gender than Education Researchers at the Urban Institute studied how six demographic groups (Black women, Black men, Latinx women, Latinx men, White women, and White men) are crowded into jobs of differing quality. This unique research data allowed me to dive deep into visual forms that help underline the occupational segregation that exists for non-White male individuals. I worked iteratively to gather stakeholder feedback and refine the visualizations and user interface. This project was featured on the 2024 Information is Beautiful Awards longlist!
  • SvelteKit
  • D3.js
  • Layer Cake
  • R
Project Link GitHub Repo
Unstable Work is All Too Common, Especially for Black Women Building on the occupational crowding research within "Getting a Good Job Depends More on Race and Gender than Education", researchers focused on the experience of Black women in alternative work situations. This explanatory feature and exploratory data tool enables workforce researchers to dive deeper into the occupational crowding of Black women across identity groups.
  • SvelteKit
  • D3.js
  • Layer Cake
  • Datawrapper
  • R
Project Link GitHub Repo
What's in My YouTube History: Music I knew there was something to glean from my YouTube history data, exported from Google Takeout after Reddit inspiration. After some EDA in R using the tidyverse, I quickly realized there was potential for a data app here. This project was featured on the 2023 Information is Beautiful Awards longlist!
  • React
  • Material UI
  • visx
  • tidyjs
  • R
Project Link GitHub Repo
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Talks and Posts

I love speaking and writing about data, visualization, and technology. I co-host the Philadelphia Data Visualization Meetup where I curate interesting talks on the intersection of information visualization, data analytics, and design thinking.

Unwrapped Conference 2024: Creating Extended Datawrapper Tooltips w/ Svelte

In March 2024, I spoke to the annual Datawrapper conference on how to extend Datawrapper tooltips using Svelte, focusing on creating interactive charts with custom data displays. I dove into how to use Datawrapper's chart interaction events and Svelte's reactive programming model to send data from a Datawrapper chart to a Svelte application for displaying additional context. Check out the GitHub repository I mention in the video!

The Urban Institute data visualization team creates a wide array of visual products, including static charts for reports and briefs, interactive standalone graphs for the Urban Wire blog, and larger exploratory tools, all to make research findings more accessible for policymakers, researchers, community leaders, and other stakeholders.

Posted on May 9, 2024

The quest for making melodic discoveries from almost any source

Posted on Jul 8, 2023
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