2018.09.19 edition
Parties and parliaments. ParlGov, “a data infrastructure for political science,” has collected detailed information on 1,500+ political parties, the results of 900+ elections, and the formation of 1,400+ parliamentary cabinets. The 37 countries it covers include every member of the European Union plus certain non-EU members of the OECD (such as Israel, Turkey, and Canada — but not the United States). The datasets are available in several formats, can be explored online, and come with extensive documentation. [h/t Jovi Juan]
Home energy consumption. For many decades, the Department of Energy’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey has been asking people about their homes’ energy-related characteristics (e.g., number of bedrooms and roofing materials) and energy-consuming appliances (e.g., television size and dishwasher use). Then, the agency cross-references those answers with billing data collected “directly from energy suppliers under a mandatory authority granted by Congress.” The survey has been conducted 14 times since 1978; survey microdata is available for the eight most recent iterations.
Open-access scholarship. Unpaywall has collected data on millions of open-access scholarly articles, plus many more paywalled articles. You can download the full dataset, or submit specific Digital Object Identifiers to the website’s API or online form. For each article, you can learn whether it’s openly accessible, whether the journal that published it is open-access, and additional details about the article itself. [h/t @authcontroller]
U.S. citizens’ deaths overseas. The U.S. Department of State publishes, “to the maximum extent practicable,” a database of “each United States citizen who dies in a foreign country from a non-natural cause.” The database currently contains 13,045 deaths, starting in October 2002, and is updated every six months. For each incident, the database provides the date, city, and cause of death. [h/t Jacquelyn Elias]
New York real estate brokers. New York State’s Department of State publishes a structured listing of all real estate brokers, salespeople, and offices currently licensed by the agency. Roughly half of the 160,000 licensees are registered to business addresses in New York City. The ZIP code with the largest raw number of active licenses is 10022, a chunk of Midtown East that includes (among other things) the Waldorf Astoria and Trump Tower.