2017.09.20 edition
Broadband access and cost. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission publishes a ton of data on the “wireline” telecommunications industry, including several datasets about broadband internet access. Among them: the places where providers offer service, subscriptions per 1,000 households in each Census tract, and a survey of plans available in urban areas. You can also find a spreadsheet of payphones-by-state at the bottom of that landing page. (As of last March, there were only 113 payphones left in North Dakota, down from 705 in 2008.) Related: “Signs of Digital Distress,” a new Brookings Institution report, with findings and maps based on the broadband subscription data.
Post-disaster aerial imagery. After major natural disasters, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey routinely collects detailed aerial photos of the affected areas. For each disaster — including Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and a couple dozen others — you can download the full set of (georeferenced) images, by date and survey flight. [h/t David Yanofsky]
Voters’ attitudes and choices, over time. The Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, “a research collaboration comprised of nearly two dozen analysts and scholars from across the political spectrum,” has published the participant-level data from its 2016 VOTER survey. It’s a “unique longitudinal data set” that represents the “political attitudes, values, and affinities” of 8,000 American adults who were interviewed first in December 2011, then again before and after the 2012 election, and again in December 2016. [h/t Jenny Listman]
Trump Organization domain registrations. Earlier this year, Politico reporters scoured the internet’s WHOIS records for domains registered to the Trump Organization. They found thousands, including TrumpRussia.com, No2Trump.com, Trumpublican.net, and ImBeingSuedByTheDonald.com. (Most, including those, just send readers to a generic “domain parking” landing page.) Politico has open-sourced the article’s components, including a JSON file containing 1,267 of the domains, which includes each domain’s owner, creation date, last-updated date, and expiration date. [h/t Tyler Fisher]
xkcd. The popular “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language” provides an interface for grabbing data about each comic strip, including the title, image file, date of publication, easter-egg-y “alt” text, and transcript. [h/t Karl L. Hughes]