Data Is Plural

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

2019.12.18 edition

Emissions, the Arab Barometer, Duterte’s drug war deaths, think tank citations, and jump scares.

Emissions indicators. The Climate Action Tracker is “an independent scientific analysis” that keeps tabs on 32 countries’ progress on tackling climate change. Through its data portal, you can explore the project’s dozens of indicators — such as emissions per capita and renewable energy capacity — and also download the data in bulk. The countries covered include “the biggest emitters and a representative sample of smaller emitters,” and account for “about 80% of global emissions and approximately 70% of global population.” [h/t Erik Gahner Larsen]

MENA public opinion. The Arab Barometer has “been conducting high quality and reliable public opinion surveys in the Middle East and North Africa since 2006,” and bills itself as “the largest repository of publicly available data on the views of men and women in the MENA region.” You can download raw survey data or explore it through the Barometer’s online analysis tool. [h/t Chris Marsicano]

Duterte’s drug war deaths. In the Philippines’ drug war, President Rodrigo Duterte has given police broad permission to kill suspected drug dealers. But an investigation by reporters at the Columbia Journalism School earlier this year found that “large numbers of killings […] have been excluded from official counts.” The reporters collected data from 23 sources on 2,320 killings by police and unidentified assailants between July 2016 and December 2017 in three municipalities. Their dataset (free account required to download, alternate version here) indicates the month, local police station, whether police recorded the death, and more. Related: Because so many deaths appear to have gone unreported, the journalists worked with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group to estimate the total number of undocumented deaths. [h/t Scilla Alecci]

Think tank citations. Andrew Thompson scoured three years of articles from nine publications — Axios, BuzzFeed News, The Economist, The Hill, The New York Times, Politico, Vice News, Vox, and The Wall Street Journal — for mentions of any organization in Wikipedia’s list of US think tanks. The resulting spreadsheet contains more than 15,000 entries, relating to 172 think tanks. Each entry lists the publication, the think tank, the relevant sentence, and a link to the article.

Boo! Where’s The Jump aims “to provide a comprehensive listing of the jump scares in horror and thriller movies.” The website doesn’t provide data downloads, but its list of 540+ movies — with year of release, “jump count,” “jump scare rating,” availability on Netflix, and more — can be copy-pasted into a spreadsheet. Related: “The Lazy Director’s Guide To Jump Scares.” [h/t Sophie Warnes]