Data Is Plural

Disability claims processing. The Social Security Administration publishes monthly and annual datasets tracking each state agency’s progress processing disability claims. The datasets, which go back to October 2000, count the number of initial claims received, pending, determined, and approved by each agency during each period, as well as similar breakdowns for denial reconsiderations and continuing disability reviews. The administration’s extensive catalog of public datasets also includes several that measure the waiting involved, such as monthly average initial claim processing times, average wait times for reconsiderations, and wait times for administrative hearings. As seen in: “Wait times for Social Security disability benefit decisions reach new high” (USAFacts).

Evapotranspiration. With the goal of “filling the biggest data gap in water management,” the OpenET project uses satellite imagery, weather data, and other sources to estimate the volume of evapotranspiration — “the process by which water is transferred from the land to the atmosphere” — at a 30-meter resolution across 17 states in the western US. The results are available to explore via an online map of annual cumulative evapotranspiration (2019–2024), as monthly datasets via Earth Engine, and through an API. [h/t Mira Rojanasakul]

Fuel forecasts. The US Energy Information Administration’s monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook provides forecasts and recent trends of energy supply, consumption, prices, and inventory. It covers a range of commodities and electricity sources, such as crude oil, coal, natural gas, gasoline, renewables, and nuclear. Starting with its September 2024 report, the outlooks have also begun to include more detailed data on biofuels, available in Table 4d of its structured datasets.

Trash balloons. Since May of this year, North Korea has floated thousands of trash-carrying balloons into South Korea. A team from the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Beyond Parallel project has mapped 160+ known balloon landing locations, based on public sources. The map’s downloadable data indicates the each landing’s date, associated “wave,” coordinates, location name, and province. As seen in: Reuters’ visually immersive article on the topic. [h/t Soph Warnes]

Anglo-Saxons on record. The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project “aims to provide structured information relating to all the recorded inhabitants of England from the late sixth to the late eleventh century.” Built over (relatively less) time by several teams at UK universities, PASE is “based on a systematic examination of the available written sources for the period, including chronicles, saints’ Lives, charters, libri vitae, inscriptions, Domesday Book and coins.” The Domesday-focused portion of the project features a downloadable table of 17,000+ landholders from that manuscript, listing their name (where known), gender, description, value of holdings, and linking to details about those holdings. [h/t Derek M. Jones]