Data Is Plural

Education data, unified. “Every year, the federal government releases large amounts of data on US schools, districts, and colleges. But this information is scattered across multiple datasets, and changes in data structure make it hard to measure change.” The Urban Institute’s Education Data Explorer aims to fix that by pulling together the Department of Education’s Common Core of Data, Civil Rights Data Collection, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, and College Scorecard, plus the Census Bureau’s Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates. You download custom queries, access the data via an API, or download bulk files for all elementary and secondary schools, school districts, and colleges. [h/t Daniel Wood]

Las Calles de las Mujeres. GeoChicas, an initiative to close the gender gap in the OpenStreetMap community, has built an interactive map and dataset that shows which streets in Latin America and Spain that are named after women (and the much larger number named after men). So far, they’ve mapped 11 cities in 8 countries, including Barcelona, Havana, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires.

Serbian anti-corruption proceedings. Postupci Protiv Funkcionera “is a unique database made by the Center for Investigative Reporting of Serbia, which gives citizens the opportunity to get information in one place about the processes conducted by the Serbian Anti-Corruption Agency against public officials in the period from 2010 to November 2018.” The database contains information on nearly 2,800 proceedings against more than 1,700 officials, and can be downloaded as an RDS file (and opened in R). Kudos: The project has been shortlisted for the 2019 Data Journalism Awards. (Full shortlist here.)

Lone Star land use. The Texas General Land Office’s geospatial data offerings include beach access points, shoreline environmental sensitivity ratings, offshore oil structures, oil and gas leases, and more. Related: “Relinquishing Riches: Auctions vs Informal Negotiations in Texas Oil and Gas Leasing,” and NBER working paper by economists Thomas R. Covert and Richard L. Sweeney; code and data available on GitHub.

From !!! to The Zutons. Duncan Geere’s 00s Indie Band Database quantifies 130+ acts from the early-millennium’s indie music scenes. In addition to basic facts, the database also includes several subjective scales: “Guitars to Synths,” “Artsy to Populist,” “Loudness,” and “Coolness.”