Data Is Plural

... is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets.

2018.02.07 edition

Hollywood’s romantic age gaps, terrorism incidents, invasive species, Fed forecasts, and Donkey Kong.

Hollywood’s romantic age gaps. Lynn Fisher’s Hollywood Age Gap collects data on silver screen love interests — more than 880 so far, from more than 630 movies — and then calculates the difference in those actors’ ages. The largest gap so far is the 52-year age difference in Harold and Maude. The movie with the most pairings is Love Actually, with seven. You can download the data as JSON and CSV files from the project’s GitHub page. [h/t Julia Smith]

Terrorism incidents. The Global Terrorism Database, run by a University of Maryland–based consortium, is an “open-source database” of more than 170,000 terrorist events. The database, which currently covers 1970 through 2016, is well-documented and includes information about about the attackers, locations, weapons, victims, and more. Note: To download the data, you first need to accept an end-user license agreement. Previously: Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States, from the same consortium (DIP 2017.05.24). [h/t Brian C. Keegan]

Invasive species. The Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species combines data and observations from thousands of sources to create a standardized database of such species in more than 200 countries. can be explored by kingdom (plants, animals, fungi, etc.), ecosystem, and country. Each slice of data can be downloaded as a CSV. Related: In a Scientific Data paper published last month, the researchers behind the effort described their methodology in detail.

Federal Reserve forecasts. Before each meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve’s research staff prepares a set of economic projections known as the Greenbook. Those forecasts are kept secret for five years, and then released to the public. The Philadelphia Fed’s archive of public Greenbook data dates back to 1966, and contains both PDFs and structured data files.

Donkey Kong. KongTrackr hosts detailed stats about specific games played on the beloved arcade fixture, with a focus on record-setting scores. The website’s database, which can be downloaded as a single JSON file, currently includes 1,715 games by 450 players. Related: KongTrackr played a role in some recent high-score commotion. Also related: KongTrackr says its site is “heavily influenced” by this database of StarCraft 2 results.