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Becca Aaronson

Becca Aaronson’s staff photo

Becca Aaronson was the first product manager at the Tribune, where she worked from 2010 to 2018. As product manager, Becca managed the Tribune's website redesign, coordinates cross-departmental projects and conducted user research to improve reader experience. She previously worked on the Tribune's data visuals team as a developer and project manager, contributing to several award-winning investigative projects. She covered health care from 2012 to 2014, making waves with her coverage of women's health and the Wendy Davis abortion filibuster. She has a bachelor’s degree in cultural theory from Scripps College in Claremont, Calif.

Past Contributions

  • On the Records: What's In the Words

    By Becca Aaronson

    Since you probably don’t have time to look through 70-some campaign ad transcripts, we converted them into word clouds to help visualize the rhetoric of each political party. The word clouds compare the 100 most-used words by Republicans to the 100 most-used words by Democrats. The font size of each word is relative to its frequency of use. Full Story 

    Word cloud of Republican ads from Ads Infinitum blog.
    Credit: Wordle.net

  • Interactive: Ads Infinitum

    By Becca Aaronson and Matt Stiles

    Since The Texas Tribune launched in November 2009, the Ads Infinitum blog has collected and posted political advertisements — more than 70 in all — from candidates in both parties running for various offices during the primary and general election campaigns. We recently went back and collected data on all the ads we've posted and created a treemap data visualization so readers could sort them across categories. Transcripts of the ads and the videos themselves are also available via an interactive table. View the treemap and a video tutorial on how to use it. Full Story 

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    Credit: Illustration by Todd Wiseman

  • Treemap: Visualize Texas Political Ads

    By Becca Aaronson

    Since November 2009, when the Tribune first opened its doors, the blog 'Ads Infinitum' has tracked significant political advertisements from the primary and general elections. As it turns out, we've covered more Republican advertisements than Democratic. We created a treemap data visualization so readers could easily sort the advertisements by five different categories: candidate/organization, political party, election, promotional/attack, distribution. Full Story