Data Is Plural

Presidential schedules. Among its various White House–related undertakings, Roll Call Factba.se provides event-by-event structured data representing the public presidential calendars for Donald Trump and Joe Biden since the latter’s inauguration in January 2021. The schedules, available to download in bulk, provide each event’s day and time, location, a brief description, and other details. They contain 9,400+ entries from Biden’s four years in office plus another 300+ from Trump’s second term so far. The events include those from the official presidential schedule, those derived from pool reports, and press briefings. As seen in: POTUS Tracker. [h/t Dan Brady]

Water availability. The US Geological Survey last month released its National Water Availability Assessment, “a pioneering scientific overview of water availability that offers first-of-its-kind insights into the balance between water supply and demand across the conterminous United States.” Alongside the report, USGS launched a “data companion” providing “regularly updated, model-based estimates” of monthly water usage within each of the country’s hydrologic units. Estimates for water availability and water supply are “coming soon,” while those for water quality and aquatic ecosystems are “coming later.”

18 million deceased veterans. BIRLS.org, a new website from Reclaim The Records, provides “an index to basic biographical information on more than 18 million deceased American veterans who received some sort of veterans benefits in their lifetime”. Those records, obtained through a FOIA lawsuit, represent a substantial chunk of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem. The site also helps you file follow-up requests for any individual’s “full VA claims file, which may contain hundreds of pages of never-before-seen biographical and historical material about the veteran, their military service, and their interactions with the VA.” Note: The “database is not a comprehensive database of all American veterans, but rather a partial and incomplete index of veterans who were eligible for VA benefits or whose heirs had some kind of contact with the VA regarding benefits.”

Argentine treaties. Javier I. Santander, a career diplomat, has built a dataset of 8,200+ bilateral treaties signed by Argentina from 1810 and 2023. It lists each treaty’s title, status, date signed, and counterpart country. The dataset is based on the government’s Digital Library of Treaties, where you can find copies of the treaties themselves. The most common counterparts have been neighboring countries — Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay — followed by Germany, the US, and Italy.

Chord progressions. Spyridon Kantarelis et al. have created CHORDONOMICON, a dataset identifying the progressions of 51 million chords in 667,000+ songs. The dataset is based on tablatures from the website Ultimate Guitar and then “annotated with structural parts, genre, and release date”. Most entries also include the song’s and artist’s IDs in Spotify’s system. [h/t Dale Debber]