2022.03.09 edition
Refugees fleeing Ukraine. The UN’s refugee agency last week launched a data portal tracking the arrival of refugees from Ukraine in other countries. The daily-updated maps, charts, and structured data provide counts and estimates of arrivals by date, by receiving country, and overall. Related: The UN’s Refugee Population Statistics Database, which “contains information about forcibly displaced populations spanning more than 70 years of statistical activities.”
International crises. The International Crisis Behavior Project, initiated in 1975, collects detailed data about interstate military-security crises such as the Mukden Incident, Cuban Missile Crisis, and Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. The project’s datasets and online catalog, now in their 14th version, have come to cover 487 crises between 1918 and 2017. The dozens of variables include the start and end dates, type of triggering event, centrality of violence, use of mediation, type of outcome, and more. Related: The International Crisis Behavior Events project, developed by a separate group of researchers, has translated the sub-events within ICB’s summaries into structured data. [h/t Lynn Cherny]
Foreign ministry statements. The FOCUSdata project, led by New Jersey City University’s National Security Studies Department, has compiled English-language statements and articles from the foreign ministries and state media in Russia, North Korea, China, and Iran. Many of the collections span more than a decade, and typically extend to 2019 or 2020. The project also presents interactive charts showing estimated sentiment trends and topic frequencies. [h/t Graig Klein + Juste Codjo]
Prison COVID policies. Between April 2020 and April 2021, researchers at the UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project gathered 3,500+ policy announcements from federal and state prison agencies in the US. Their Prison Policy Index spreadsheet, published earlier this year, describes the announcements they gathered through April 2021. It indicates the state, date publicized, and date collected, and provides an archival link, a short summary, and a series of columns classifying the policies announced.
Medieval prices. The Medieval and Early Modern Data Bank, an effort that dates back to the 1980s, contains six datasets relating to currency exchanges, prices, wages, and textile production in Europe “circa 800-1815 C.E.” The records, which have been compiled from prior publications (such as a statistical compendium of grain sales in Cologne), can be queried online or downloaded in bulk. [h/t Vlad Zavidovych + Mirko Lorenz]