For example, one of my favorite stories from the past year is one that I wrote with my colleague Conor Dougherty about investors buying up single-family homes. We had access to a huge data set — millions and millions of real estate transactions — that showed how investors had come to dominate the market for starter homes in many cities. But what really made the story come to life was when we zoomed in on one house that had changed hands several times and got to talk to all the people who had touched it — the investor who flipped it, the family that bought it, the would-be buyer who kept losing out to investors.

At the end of the day, data isn’t the story; people are the story.

Fair enough. But I assume you aren’t doing all that data analysis on your phone. Or on your TI calculator, for that matter.

Yes, that’s true. I do most of my data analysis in a statistical programming language called R. It lets me work with data sets that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of rows, much too large for a spreadsheet program like Excel. It also makes it easy to automate tasks that I perform regularly — so when the Labor Department’s monthly jobs report comes out, for example, I can download the new data and update my analysis with just a few keystrokes.

R also has a great suite of tools for making charts, which is a critical part of my work. The Times has the best graphics team in the business, and I can’t come close to doing what it does in terms of making beautiful, readable charts and interactive graphics. But I’m not trying to make charts like that. I just need something that lets me spot a trend or relationship, or that helps identify examples that are worth exploring further. For that, quick-and-dirty is just fine.

In terms of hardware, I wish I could tell you I was running some hotshot rig with multicore processors and a boatload of RAM. But these days I do pretty much all my work on a standard-issue laptop. I store some data in the cloud, but that’s mostly because I don’t want to lose it all if my computer melts down.