Data Is Plural

UN blue helmets. The United Nations publishes data describing its active peacekeeping missions and police and military personnel, plus all peacekeeping fatalities since 1948. Also: The International Peace Institute’s Peacekeeping Database tracks member-countries’ historical contributions of personnel going back to 1990. Plus: Last month, researchers at Uppsala University’s Department of Peace and Conflict Research introduced a Geocoded Peacekeeping Operations dataset, which provides detailed information about the location and troops for all UN peacekeeping deployments in Africa from 1994 to 2014, with stated plans to extend coverage through 2018 soon. [h/t u/smurfyjenkins]

Earthquakes in Mexico. Researchers have constructed a “unified catalog” more than 5,000 earthquakes in Mexico. To do so, they standardized, deduplicated, and fact-checked quake information from more than 100 local, regional, and international sources. The final dataset goes back to 1787 and details each quake’s epicenter, depth, magnitude, and sources. The researchers consider the catalog to be complete for earthquakes with a moment magnitude of 6+ since 1925, and for those with a magnitude of 4+ since 1990.

Seized Greek real estate. For an article in AthensLive, Sotiris Sideris collected data on properties up for bidding through eauction.gr, Greece’s official website for auctioning real estate seized from over-indebted borrowers. The dataset includes 45,918 lots listed between mid-November 2017 (when the website launched) and September 1, 2019. For each lot, the dataset specifies the auction date, property characteristics, starting bid, total debt, debtor, “hastener” pursuing the auction, links to additional documentation, and more.

Bollywood. Parth Parikh, an engineering student in Mumbai, has created The Indian Movie Database, which aggregates and cross-references data on Bollywood films from IMDB, Wikipedia, and MovieLens. It currently contains more than 4,700 movies released between 1950 and 2019.

Medieval monasteries. Economists Serra Boranbay-Akan and Carmine Guerriero have built a dataset describing the locations and operating years of more than 3,000 Cistercian and Franciscan monasteries in 90 European regions between the years 1000 and 1600.