Words used in layoff letters

Tech layoffs continue, and as companies deliver more letters, there are some repeated topics. For The Washington Post, Hamza Shaban, Luis Melgar, and Leslie Shapiro parsed out the patterns:

The Post analyzed 48 publicly available memos from tech companies ranging from start-ups that have raised at least $50 million to trillion-dollar giants that have announced layoffs since last summer. Major themes and key words for each theme were determined after reviewing the memos. The Post programmatically split each memo into sentences and identified each sentence with a key word. Sentences were manually vetted to verify correct classification. A single sentence may be assigned multiple categories. Design elements are direct quotes from layoff memos with the exception of the first, where “Dear” was not necessarily used.

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Visualizing 16th century letter correspondence of the Tudor government

Kim Albrecht, Ruth Ahnert, and Sebastian Ahnert visualized the network of communications over time and space:

The Tudor government maintained a communication network that criss-crossed the globe. This visualisation brings together 123,850 letters connecting 20,424 people from the United Kingdom’s State Papers archive, dating from the accession of Henry VIII to the death of Elizabeth I (1509-1603).

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