Data Is Plural

The Freedman’s Bank. The Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company was chartered by Congress in 1865, toward the end of the Civil War, to provide banking services to formerly enslaved Americans. “Though the bank achieved some early successes, it failed catastrophically in 1874, destroying the savings of a broad swath of newly freed black citizens,” write Malcolm Wardlaw and Virginia Traweek, who have constructed several datasets based on handwritten records preserved by the federal government. One dataset lists 5,000+ transactions from 500+ accounts’ “passbooks”, indicating the account holder, city, transaction type, date, and amount. Another lists 40,000+ accounts’ final balances at the time of the bank’s failure. Read more: Wardlaw and Traweek’s studies analyzing the records.

Recreational boating accidents. In the US, recreational boaters must notify state authorities soon after any incident involving a death, serious injury, disappearance, or substantial damage. The authorities relay those notifications to the Coast Guard, which stores them in its centralized Boating Accident Report Database. The Data Liberation Project (which, customary disclosure, I run) filed a FOIA request for the database and, earlier this week, published the records it received. The data describe 58,000+ boating accidents, 78,000+ vessels, 8,900+ deaths, and 36,000+ injuries from 2009 to 2023, although a few states and territories withheld their incidents from disclosure. Read more: The Data Liberation Project’s introductory documentation.

Western water rights. Matthew D. Lisk et al. have compiled and standardized a dataset of water rights records — key documents in the allocation of the scarce resource — in the Western United States. Drawing on raw data collected from 11 states, the harmonized dataset “provides consistent unique identifiers for each spatial unit of water management across the domain, unique identifiers for each water right record, and a consistent categorization scheme that puts each water right record into one of 7 broad use categories.” Those categories: irrigation, domestic, livestock, fish, industrial, environmental, and other. The authors have also published a set of shapefiles outlining each water management area’s boundaries.

Real-time UK voter registrations. The UK government’s voter registration statistics dashboard updates hundreds of times per day. It provides downloadable data on the number of online applications in each five-minute interval in the past 24 hours and daily counts broken down by online vs. paper applications, age group, elector type, and nation. [h/t Giuseppe Sollazzo]

Watching grass grow. The Jornada Experimental Range, run by the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, “is one of the longest serving laboratories focused on rangelands and drylands in the world.” Located north of Las Cruces, N.M., the site has operating since the 1910s. A few years ago, Erica Christensen et al. published a dataset of grass and shrub growth within 122 one-meter-by-one-meter squares on the range from 1915 to 2016, containing roughly 200,000 observations.