Data Is Plural

Easier-to-use crime data. Earlier this month, the FBI and 18F released the first iteration of their Crime Data Explorer, a website that simplifies access to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. You can download bulk data on individual incidents, state and national trends, hate crimes, arrests, assaults on officers, police employees, human trafficking, and cargo theft. You can also access the data via an API. Caution: The FBI’s data collection program is voluntary; not all law enforcement agencies participate. (In fact, more than 3,000 agencies don’t submit hate crime data.) [h/t Nick Wright]

Chyrons. The TV News Archive’s new “Third Eye” project is extracting chyrons — those placards of text at the bottom of news broadcasts, also known as “lower thirds” — from four major cable networks: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The resulting database contains every chyron that Third Eye’s optical character recognition (OCR) software has extracted since late August. Related: This Washington Post piece analyzing cable news’ chyrons during James Comey’s congressional testimony, and this explanation of how they did it. [h/t Nancy Watzman]

Every building, river, and green space in Great Britain. The UK’s Ordnance Survey makes detailed digital maps of Great Britain. Their free offerings include all of the island’s roads, rivers, green spaces, and place names. The Survey’s “open map” includes buildings, railways, electricity transmission lines, and other features. Related: Want only the buildings? The University of Sheffield’s Alasdair Rae has you covered. [h/t Robyn Inglis]

NYC streets: the good, the bad, and the closed. New York City’s Department of Transportation publishes a bunch of data, including its own assessments of each street segment’s quality on a 1-to-10 scale. It also publishes spreadsheets of all construction-related street closures, by intersection and by block, updated daily. [h/t Christian Moscardi]

Your job, in numbers. For each of 966 occupations, the Department of Labor’s O*NET database quantifies the types knowledge, skills, abilities, education, and training required, tasks involved, tools used, and more job-related parameters. Related: The Upshot uses the data to ask (and answer), “What Is Your Opposite Job?”