Discover Data Repositories by Disciplinary Area
Want to find ecological datasets? Or data on criminal justice? The Registry of Research Data Repositories describes thousands of repositories around the world and allows you to drill down from broader to narrower disciplinary focus.
- re3data.orgA global registry of research data repositories that one can browse or search and filter.
Example Data Sources by Topic
The sources in this list may not necessarily be spatial, but they could have some spatial component or geographic variables of some kind. Look for columns or variables with shapes that are standardized (county names, state names, street names, etc.) or, if you are looking for points, look for columns or variables with latitude/longitude.
People, opinions, values, choices
- CQ Voting and Elections Collection This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations and the full text)
A collection of data and analyses of US elections, including data on presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial elections, political parties, campaigns, and demographic information. Covers presidential election results from 1789 and forward. Note: You can also search across all of the CQ Press reference resources here.
- Pew Research DatasetsOpinion data collected by Pew
- Roper Center Dataset Search This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and abstracts)
Find public opinion survey datasets available for download and analysis. If you would rather search by individual question, see iPoll instead. Covers 1942 - current.
NOTE: You will need to register with your Carleton email address to begin fully using this database.
- National Archive of of Criminal Justice DataArchives, preserves, and provides access to the NCVS and a variety of criminal justice data for researchers, including data on capital punishment and corrections. Some of the data indexed on this site is available for online analysis using the SDA program.
- IPUMS: Integrated Public Use Microdata SeriesClean and well-documented microdata from the US Census, international censuses, as well as the Current Population Survey, time use data, health data, and higher education data. From the Minnesota Population Center.
- Global Population - PRIO-GRID 2.0Population data presented in a grid structure covering the globe. Each grid cell contains data on conflict, socioeconomic conditions, ethnic groups, physical attributes, climate conditions, and more.
- data.census.gov This link opens in a new window
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Statistical population, housing, economic, and geographic data from the United States Census. - Social Explorer This link opens in a new window
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Get quick and easy access to current and historical U.S. census data and demographic information. Covers 1790 - 2010.
NOTE: You will need to register with your Carleton email address to begin fully using this database. - PolicyMap This link opens in a new window
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A U.S. national data and mapping tool for research related to social sciences, public health, urban studies, real estate and housing analysis, community and economic developments, public administration, policy and political science, education, business, economics, statistics, geography, and more. Find thousands of U.S. indicators to perform demographic and socioeconomic analysis, from a neighborhood census block group in many cases, up to a national level, as well as create custom regions. Data sets are approximately 10-15 years old, and custom reports and data can be downloaded.
- American Community SurveyThe ACS replaced the long form that accompanied the Decennial Census. This is a rolling survey asking a sample of the population detailed questions. The best entries to ACS statistics are through data.census.gov or Social Explorer. ACS microdata are available from IPUMS.
- American Community Survey (ACS) via SDA (Berkeley)This online analysis tool allows you to create a custom subset of ACS data
- American Time Use Survey (ATUS) via BLSHome of the American Time Use Survey, produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with accompanying aggregate statistics, reports, releases, documentation, visualizations, etc.
- American Time Use Survey (ATUS) via IPUMSCreate a subset of microdata from the American Time Use Survey
- USDA National Agricultural Statistics ServiceCentralized location for US agricultural statistics
- USDA Economic Research Service DataData on farms, farmers, crops, and food safety. For this class, it's best to use county-level data
Environment, Climate, Earth
- EPA Data DownloadsSeveral ways to query and download the data you need from the Envirofacts system. See especially the Geospatial Download section.
- Water-Table Elevation and Depth to Water Table, Minnesota Hydrogeology Atlas Series HG-03A dataset available in the MN Geospatial Commons, featuring water table elevation from the Natural Resources Conservation Service
- Residential Energy Consumption Survey MicrodataEnergy use data from a national sample of housing units, collected roughly every five years
- Geomorpho90m - Global High-Resolution Geomorphometric LayersGlobal dataset of geomorphometric features
- Ecological Data WikiA collection of datasets relevant to the study of ecology, such as surveys of plants and animals and biomes.
Education
- US Public SchoolsA shapefile with Common Core Data (CCD) about US public schools.
- US Private SchoolsA shapefile containing data from the Private School Survey (PSS) for US private schools.
Collections of datasets for data science
The following sites have data which have been prepared for data science or data visualization projects and then shared. The data may be cleaner and more manageable than other options ... but they also may be far less well documented. It's unpredictable. Additionally, note that not all of these options may have spatial data.
- KaggleKaggle is a website for users to upload datasets, and write scripts (called kernels) to analyze the data. Kaggle also has competitions to create kernels to do specific tasks some even have monetary prizes.
- Tidy TuesdayDatasets collected for experimentation in data wrangling and exploration (like Kaggle, you'll need to do your own analysis and not replicate what's here)
- CORGIS Datasets ProjectNicely described, clean datasets
- Fivethirtyeight DataDatasets from FiveThirtyEight publications
- ProPublica Data StoreDatasets used in ProPublica stories
