Renata Carlos Daou
Data Journalist and Polyglot
About Me
I am a journalist currently pursuing a Master of Science degree in data journalism at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. On this website, you will discover a collection of my most recent data stories and projects. Feel free to explore my Github for more details on each project. Your suggestions and tips are always welcome!
My hobbies include watching children’s movies, learning new languages, exploring exotic dishes, and traveling extensively—I’ve visited over 20 countries!
Coding Projects
Below are some of my recent projects. Each one includes a brief description and a link to see the code on Github.
✈️ I Asked Four Young Women What Their Favorite Countries Are. Here’s What They Said.
For this feature, I had a blast chatting with four awesome women between 21 to 25 years old who have bravely taken on solo travel around the globe. They shared their insights on their favorite trips around the world. For the adventure junkies, stick around until the end. I used scrollytelling techniques to make this a very engaging and easy-to-read story.
See code
The Amazon Faces a New Threat: Fire
Intensified agricultural burning pushes fires into virgin forests, worsening environmental crisis. The story highlights several critical issues related to land and fire management in the region. It identifies illegal land grabbing practices (grilagem) and underscores the severe impact of drought on both transportation infrastructure and wildlife. Firefighting operations, such as Operation Aceiro, face significant logistical and operational challenges. There are notable discrepancies in deforestation data and widespread underreporting of fire incidents. Satellite imagery analysis reveals fire hotspots frequently occurring within registered agricultural zones, while the government's fire management efforts and resource allocation often neglect remote and unregistered areas, where the most destructive fires take place.
See code
Taylor Swift Helps Me Burn More Calories. Here's Proof
In this project, I compared CycleBar and SoulCycle, two spin classes I attended while living in New York. By analyzing data from my Apple Watch, I found that my performance was overall better at CycleBar.
See code
Taylor Swift's Daily Top 10 Most Played Songs!!
This is an auto-updating website showing the ten most listened-to Taylor Swift songs of the day. This fun project involved scraping data from Spotify, saving it to a CSV, and automating the process for the website.
See code
Ripple Effect of the Syrian Refugee Crisis
The criminalization of humanitarian work has increased since the peak of migration out of Syria in 2016. EU member states' actions have left asylum-seeking immigrants isolated and devoid of assistance upon their arrival in Europe, following arduous and dangerous journeys. This project involved mapping the countries with the most immigrants from Syria after scraping data from UNHCR.
See code
BBC 21st Century's Greatest Films - Worldwide Box Office
For this project, I utilized Beautiful Soup and regular expressions to extract pertinent information from the webpage and create a searchable database. A well-designed database schema facilitated this organization. I also generated a map using Mapbox to visually represent the dataset, emphasizing the countries of origin of the critics.
See code
Where Has Taylor Swift Performed the Eras Tour?
For this project, I created an interactive map to see where Taylor Swift has performed the Eras Tour using Mapbox. Zoom into each country to get a closer look on the stadium locations.
See code
Forest Fires in Amazonas
This story contains data analysis of the forest fires in the state of Amazonas from 2019 and 2023, along with insights into what local residents think about it. I used the Terrabrasilis API to gather the data needed to construct the graphics on DataWrapper.
See code