2025.01.29 edition
Hyperlocal Trump/Harris results. Earlier this month, colleagues at The New York Times published “An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2024 Election” and made the underlying data available to download. The effort “currently includes results for more than 110,000 precincts, or 73 percent of all votes, and will be updated as more data is collected.” The dataset lists each precinct’s state, county FIPS code, votes received by Kamala Harris, votes received by Donald Trump, and total votes (including third parties and write-ins). It also provides each precinct’s geographical boundaries, derived from a mix of official sources and estimations. Previously: “An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2020 Election” and the data behind it (DIP 2021.02.10). See also: Precinct-level election results for 2020, 2018, 2016, and 2012 from the Voting and Election Science Team.
Private schools. The National Center for Education Statistics’s Private School Universe Survey has been gathering data about private elementary and secondary schools every two years since the 1989–90 school year. It collects information on “religious orientation; level of school; size of school; length of school year, length of school day; total enrollment (K-12); number of high school graduates, whether a school is single-sexed or coeducational and enrollment by sex; number of teachers employed; program emphasis” and more. In the latest data, covering the 2021–22 school year, “there were 29,727 private schools, enrolling 4,731,303 students and employing 482,571 full-time teachers”. As seen in: ProPublica’s Private School Demographics lookup tool (webinar scheduled for January 31) and its reporting on “segregation academies”.
Hurricane landfalls. NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division maintains a table of hurricanes that have made landfall on the continental US since the 1850s. It records the year and month of landfall, designated name, states affected, the highest Saffir-Simpson category, central pressure at landfall, and maximum sustained wind speed. The division publishes another table containing more details — such as the full date, latitude, and longitude of landfall — but with a gap in the late 1970s to early 1980s. [h/t Michael Ferragamo + Dale Debber]
Grocery ingredients. To compile GroceryDB, Babak Ravandi et al. scraped data about 50,000+ food products available on the websites of Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods. For each product, they extracted the nutritional information and ingredient list, which they provide as structured data and use for estimating each product’s degree of processing. Related: TrueFood, a website the research team built with the findings.
A royal regatta. The Henley Royal Regatta, a multi-day rowing competition, has been held on the River Thames nearly every year since 1839. Dominic Goymour has scraped the event’s online results into a dataset covering 7,500+ outcomes since 1999. It includes each race’s date, starting time, stage, boat class, cup, winning crew/club, losing crew/club, winning time, and more.