Data Is Plural

Global bike-sharing. The citybik.es API provides access to live data on every bike-sharing station in more than 400 cities around the world. It’s free, and the underlying software is open-source. What data you get per station depends on the city, but typically includes the number of empty slots, number of available bikes, and location information. Looking for bulk data on bike-sharing rides? Many cities — including New York, Chicago, and D.C. — make it available. Related: “A Tale of Twenty-Two Million Citi Bike Rides.” Also related: Three maps illustrating the gender gap in bike-share usage.

Nine years of homelessness estimates. Every January, at the behest of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, volunteers across the country attempt to count the homeless in their communities. The result: HUD’s “point in time” estimates, which are currently available for 2007–2015. The most recent estimates found 564,708 homeless people nationwide, with 75,323 of that count (more than 13%) living in New York City. Related: “Why counting America’s homeless is both imperative and imperfect.” Also related: “How Many Street Homeless? NYC’s Tallies Leave the Question Open.” [h/t Tim Henderson + Jonathan Stray]

Tech’s water cooler. Hacker News’ official API provides data describing every submission, comment, and user on the community-driven website. You can also analyze the full dataset via Google’s recently-relaunched BigQuery Public Datasets program. [h/t Michael Gardiner]

John Snow’s data. When physician John Snow constructed his now-famous dot-map of London’s Broad Street cholera outbreak in the 1850s, the leading geospatial technologies were ink and paper. Academic Robin Wilson has adapted the data for the computer age, converting Snow’s map into several modern GIS formats. Related: Infographics in the Time of Cholera.

Jon Snow data. An API Of Ice And Fire lets you fetch data about every book, character, and house in Game of Thrones — including allegiances, family trees, and dates of death. You can also download the data in bulk. Related: Macalester researchers recently published a network analysis (and underlying data) of all characters in A Storm of Swords, the third book in the series. Jon Snow, according to the analysis, was the second-most important character. [h/t Melissa Bierly]