Data Is Plural

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

2021.01.20 edition

US demonstrations and political violence, Capitol siege charges, terms of service, India’s coal mines, and newsletter links.

US demonstrations and political violence. US Crisis Monitor “provides the public with real-time data and analysis on political violence and demonstrations around the country, establishing an evidence base from which to identify risks, hotspots, and available resources to empower local communities in times of crisis.” The project, launched last summer as a collaboration between the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (DIP 2017.11.29) and Princeton University’s Bridging Divides Initiative, now contains information on 20,000+ peaceful protests (the vast majority of entries), violent demonstrations, riots, and other events since April 2020. For each entry, the dataset lists the event type, date, location, groups involved, as well as a brief summary. As seen in: The Police’s Tepid Response To The Capitol Breach Wasn’t An Aberration (FiveThirtyEight).

Capitol siege charges. The Program on Extremism at George Washington University is building a “central database of court records related to the events of January 6, 2021.” In addition to linking to the government’s criminal complaints, indictments, and other documents, the researchers are publishing a spreadsheet of all people who’ve been federally charged — with names, age, gender, home state, and date charged.

Terms of service. The Office of the French Ambassador for Digital Affairs has been tracking user-agreement documents (such as terms of service and privacy policies) published by 170+ websites, apps, and other bits of software — from Airbnb and Google Analytics to The New York Times and Zillow. You can download them all and subscribe to notifications when they change. [h/t Vincent Viers]

India’s coal mines. Thanks to India’s Right to Information Act, energy researcher Sandeep Pai has compiled a dataset of the country’s 459 operational coal mines. It includes each mine’s name, location (state, district, latitude, longitude), ownership, production tonnage, and more. Related: Pai’s introductory Twitter thread.

Newsletter links. Winning the Internet, an experimental newsletter from The Pudding’s Russell Goldenberg, analyzes the hyperlinks found in 100+ link-heavy general-interest newsletters. Last month, Goldenberg published sixth months of the underlying data — nearly 150,000 newsletter/link/date observations in total.