Data Is Plural

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

2019.10.02 edition

Wealth distributions, Snapchat political ads, datos cubanos, bird sounds, and designer data.

Wealth, asset, and debt distributions. The Federal Reserve’s Enhanced Financial Accounts datasets are supplements to the central bank’s more-aggregated Financial Accounts of the United States statistics. Among them: wealth, asset, and debt distributions by percentile and demographic. Also: College savings plans by state and the banking industry’s balance sheet. [h/t u/loopback2019]

Snapchat political ads. Snapchat has released detailed data about every political ad purchased on its platform in 2018 and 2019. For each ad, the information includes its targeting parameters (age, gender, location, interests, internet service provider, device operating system, and more), the dates the it ran, the amount spent, number of impressions, and a link to the ad itself. Snap says this year’s data will be updated daily and that new ads will appear within 24 hours of first delivery. [h/t Erik Gahner Larsen]

Datos cubanos. Official, reliable data on Cuba is hard to come by. So Cuban journalist Barbara Maseda’s Proyecto Inventario has been collecting and publishing datasets relevant to the island nation — including by documenting the country’s legislators, blackouts, and non-agricultural cooperatives. Related: Júlio Lubianco’s profile of Maseda and the project.

Bird sounds. Machine learning scientist Agnieszka Mikołajczyk has been gathering useful resources for identifying birds by sound. The resources include about a dozen datasets of audio recordings, many of which are immediately downloadable.

Designer data. Nearly 10,000 people took the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ “Design Census” earlier this year. The (non-scientific but detailed) results are out, and the raw data are (prominently) available to download. [h/t Robin Sloan]