Data Is Plural is a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets. This edition, dated Oct. 19, 2022, has been republished with permission of the author.
Carbon pricing. In a paper published last month, Geoffroy Dolphin and Qinrui Xiahou describe their World Carbon Pricing Database. For each country (as well as each U.S. state and certain other subnational jurisdictions), the database indicates the price per metric ton of CO2 equivalent associated with any carbon taxes and cap-and-trade mechanisms in place for each year going back to 1990. It lists these prices for each combination of type of fuel and sectoral classification. Previously: The Voluntary Registry Offsets Database and the World Bank’s database of carbon pricing initiatives (DIP 2021.11.17).
UNICEF’s operations. The United Nations Children’s Fund is a signatory to the International Aid Transparency Initiative and, as such, publishes detailed data files describing its programs and activities around the world. The files are organized by country, updated monthly, and follow the initiative’s prescribed XML structure. They list each program’s name, organizations involved, locations, dates, budgets, spending, results, and more. You can also use UNICEF’s transparency portal to explore the data by program focus and country. [h/t Alexa Ighodaro]
Community-moderated tweets. Twitter recently expanded its Birdwatch pilot program, which allows certain users to anonymously “identify Tweets they believe are misleading, write notes that provide context to the Tweet, and rate the quality of other contributors’ notes.” The company provides data on all submitted notes, ratings of notes, and note status histories, though it requires you to be logged in and U.S.-based to download the files. As seen in: “COVID misinfo is the biggest challenge for Twitter’s Birdwatch program, data shows,” from The Verge’s Corin Faife, who has published an interactive, downloadable table of the notes.
U.K. museums. The Mapping Museums project has assembled a searchable, browsable, and downloadable dataset of 4,0000-plus museums active in the United Kingdom between 1960 and 2020. It includes museums dedicated to art, war, local history, transport, drinks, and many other subjects. The records, collected and refined from a range of sources, indicate each museum’s name, location, size (small, medium, large, huge), topic, year opened/closed, accreditation, type of governance, and more.
Cattle brands. Kansas ranchers must register their cattle-branding symbols with the state’s agriculture department. For decades, the department published books listing all the registered brands, indexed using a custom coding system. Mason Youngblood et al. have assembled a dataset of 90,000-plus such entries from the 1990, 2008, 2014, 2015, and 2016 books. Related: “Kansas Moves Cattle Brand Registration to the Cloud” (GovTech). [h/t Felix Riede + Dugald Foster]
Notice: Unlike most of our content, this edition of Data Is Plural by Jeremy Singer-Vine is not available for republication under a Creative Commons license.
