Data Is Plural

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

2019.01.16 edition

Journalists killed, congressional district demographics, political parties, shipping logs, and dairy.

Journalists killed, imprisoned, and missing. The Committee to Protect Journalists maintains a database of journalists who’ve been killed for reasons related to their work. The database goes back to 1992 and contains more than 1,300 entries, with details about the journalists, the circumstances of their deaths, and whether perpetrators have been convicted. More recently, the organization has also begun publishing data on journalists who’ve been imprisoned or gone missing. [h/t Giuseppe Sollazzo]

Congressional district demographics. The Census Bureau’s My Congressional District tool lets you browse (and download) demographic, socioeconomic, and business data corresponding to each of the country’s 435 congressional districts. Political scientist Ella Foster-Molina has compiled a historical dataset containing similar information for 1972 to 2014; it also contains details about each district’s representatives — such as their personal characteristics, the committees they served on, and the number of bills they sponsored. [h/t Josh McCrain + Derek Willis]

Political party data, linked. Party Facts is a “collaborative data collection” that links various political-party datasets together. The project has two main tables. One contains basic information about 4,100+ political parties in more than 200 countries, including each party’s mother-tongue name and English translation, year founded, and Wikipedia page. The second table cross-references each party with its unique identifier in 26 external datasets, such as ParlGov (DIP 2018.09.19), The Manifesto Project (DIP 2017.06.21), and the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (DIP 2016.09.28). [h/t Matt Grossmann + Erik Gahner]

Old shipping logs. In previous centuries, maritime officers kept “detailed log books of the ships’ activities and management,” including observations of the wind and weather. The Climatological Database for the World’s Oceans 1750-1850 has digitized a quarter-million entries from such logbooks, originally written in Dutch, English, French, and Spanish, and published them as detailed, structured data. Helpful: Steven Ottens has converted the project’s fixed-width files into tab-delimited data. [h/t Robi Sen + Roger Davies + Topi Tjukanov]

Moooooooooo. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Dairy Data Set contains annual tabulations of production, sales, imports, exports, consumption, and other economic aspects of “the U.S. dairy situation.” As seen in:Nobody Is Moving Our Cheese: American Surplus Reaches Record High” (NPR).