Data Is Plural

People of slavery. Recently launched, Enslaved.org allows the public to “explore or reconstruct the lives of individuals who were enslaved, owned slaves, or participated in the historical trade.” Its interactive database contains 600,000+ records, with plans to expand. The collaborative, schlolar-led project also includes The Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, which “publishes original, peer-reviewed datasets about the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.” The first issue features three datasets originally published through a precursor to Enslaved.org — Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network. Those datasets focus on Louisiana slaves (1719–1820), New Orleans “Free Blacks” (1840–1860), and enslaved Africans in Maranhão, Brazil (1767–1831).

More PPP details. Thanks to a FOIA lawsuit by a group of news organizations, the US Small Business Administration has released additional data about the financial assistance distributed through its Paycheck Protection Program. Previously (DIP 2020.07.08), the SBA’s public data withheld the specific amounts for all loans (instead listing only a broad range), as well as names and addresses for loans below $150,000. The new datasets include those amounts, names, and addresses for all loans.

More on travel/immigration bans. The COVID Border Accountability Project is tracking countries’ pandemic-related travel and immigration restrictions, on a weekly basis. The project’s team categorizes various aspects of the restrictions — whether they hinge on citizenship, halt new visa applications, et cetera — and turns them into a longitudinal dataset. Previously: The UN World Food Program’s travel-restrictions dataset (DIP 2020.12.09).

Third-Republic France. Economist Victor Gay has built a geographic dataset that traces, year by year, the administrative boundaries of France’s Third Republic, which governed from 1870 to 1940, when the Vichy Regime took power. The dataset provides annual shapefiles delineating the country’s départements, arrondissements, and cantons; as well as for its “most significant special administrative constituencies: military, judicial and penitentiary, electoral, academic, labor inspection, and ecclesiastical.”

Cyber wargames. This is, “to the best of our knowledge, […] the first dataset providing network traffic traces and corresponding event logs from a complex cyber defense exercise” — a two-day Cyber Czech event in March 2019.