Data Is Plural

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

2022.02.09 edition

People affected by Trump’s travel ban, Erasmus exchanges, national climate funds, sites that support HTTPs, and board games.

People affected by Trump’s travel ban. On January 27, 2017, then–President Trump issued an executive order suspending entry to the United States by citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries. For a recent, year-long HuffPost investigation, reporter Rowaida Abdelaziz led a team that collected and categorized the stories of 874 people affected by the travel ban, such as those who separated from a parent or child. An anonymized spreadsheet indicates the types of loss each person experienced, their nationalities, and other relevant details. Related: Between September 2019 and January 2021, the State Department published monthly, cumulative statistics about visa applications affected by later versions of the travel ban, but only as PDF reports. [h/t David Vine]

Erasmus exchanges. The European Union publishes data on the movement of students, staff, and trainees through its Erasmus+ exchange program. The most recent dataset covers academic years 2014–15 through 2019–20, detailing the international transfer of millions of participants. Each row lists a combination of variables and the number of participants who matched that description. The variables include the field of education, participant gender and nationality, duration of the exchange, sending and receiving cities and organizations, and more. As seen in: Erasmus a dos velocidades (El Confidencial). [h/t Rose Mintzer-Sweeney]

National climate funds. Boston University’s Rishikesh Ram Bhandary has constructed an inventory of national funds for financing action on climate change. The dataset, which you can download or browse interactively, currently covers 46 funds in 39 developing countries. It lists each fund’s title, year established, source of funding, host entity, scope, and more.

Sites that support HTTPS. DuckDuckGo’s Smarter Encryption project provides a big text file that lists every website that the company knows supports HTTPS, the internet encryption protocol. The list contains 31+ million entries, updated via a web crawler. Related: Last year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation began incorporating the data into its HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. (It has since announced plans to retire the decade-in-service extension, now that “HTTPS is truly just about everywhere.”) [h/t Giulio Magnifico]

Board games. BoardGameGeek users have submitted millions of ratings over the past two decades, judging tens of thousands of games. The website provides an API that lets you search for games and retrieve detailed information about their attributes and ratings. As seen in: “Diving into BoardGameGeek,” by Jesse van Elteren, who crawled the API to compile a dataset of 19 million ratings from 410,000+ users. [h/t Jordan Isip]