Data Is Plural

NYC evictions. New York City’s government publishes a dataset listing evictions “pending, scheduled and executed” since 2017, updated daily. The data are “compiled from the majority of New York City Marshals,” who are mayor-appointed officers tasked with enforcing civil court cases. Each of the 97,000+ rows indicates the eviction court case number, address, property type, eviction type, execution date, and marshal. Related: The city also publishes data on marshals’ annual eviction revenues. Also related: nycdb points to, and helps download, a range of NYC housing–related datasets. As seen in: “Spiking Evictions Renew Calls to Reform NYC Marshals System,” by Patrick Spauster for City Limits.

Open-source weather APIs. Open-Meteo, an open-source project built on data from national weather services, offers a range of weather and climate APIs that are free for non-commercial use. They include weather forecasts (temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed, etc.), daily historical weather since 1940, climate change model outputs, marine wave forecasts, air quality assessments, and more. The project also provides bulk downloads of the underlying data and self-hosting instructions. As seen in: Jan Kühn’s Historical Meteo Graphs. [h/t Giuseppe Sollazzo]

Tree canopies. The High Resolution Canopy Height Maps dataset, released in April by Meta and the World Resources Institute, estimates “tree canopy height at a 1-meter resolution, allowing the detection of single trees at a global scale.” It is available to explore online and download, and was constructed by applying machine learning techniques to satellite imagery and LiDAR data. The estimates use satellite imagery mostly from 2018–2020, and “when newer imagery is available, the publicly shared model can be used to detect change in canopy heights.” [h/t Ben Hur Pintor]

Canadian mines. Economist Clara Dallaire-Fortier has compiled a dataset of “mine-level estimates for the Canadian mining industry with a persistent annual coverage between 1950 and 2022,” based partly on historical government maps. For each of the 947 mines identified, the dataset indicates its name, location, mining companies, dates open/closed, and commodities produced. Previously: Australian mine production, 1799–2021 (DIP 2023.07.12).

James Beard honorees. Cody Winchester has constructed a dataset of James Beard Foundation Award semifinalists, nominees, and winners since 1991, sourced from the foundation’s award-search page. For each honoree, the dataset provides their name, year, category, subcategory, and award status, plus additional category-specific variables (such as publisher for the book awards, and location for restaurant and chef awards).