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Arts Culture and Media: Everyday Data

Resources for finding data and developing information evaluation skills for the Everyday Data course.

Data Mapping and Reports

PolicyMap
Policy Map allows you to download and map recent data relating to demographics, housing, income, crime, mortgages, health, jobs, manufacturing, supermarket access, and more. Includes data sets from over 150 public and proprietary sources Rutgers-restricted Access
Social Explorer 
Social Explorer allows you to find data, map, and create reports based on the U.S. Decennial Census of population and housing back to 1790 and the American Community Survey; Amercan election results from 1912 to 2018 and other data reports. Rutgers-restricted Access

Indexes and Databases

Statista 
Statista integrates statistical data from over 80,000 topics in areas such as business, education, finance, media, politics, society, and technology. Statista gathers data from over 18,000 sources, including market reports, trade publications, scientific journals, and government databases. The reports, charts, infographics, and statistics found in the database can be downloaded in Excel, PDF, PNG, or PowerPoint formats or embedded in web pages. Rutgers-restricted Access
Data-Planet Statistical Datasets
Access to data from more than 70 organizational sources. Most data series focus on recent years and a few prior decades, although some data series extend back to the 19th century. Rutgers-restricted Access
County and City Data Books. 1947-2007
While included data varies, in the later volumes it includes information on: age, agriculture, births, business establishments, climate, construction, crime, deaths, earnings, education, elections, employment, finance, government, health, households, housing, income, labor force, manufactures, population, poverty, race and Hispanic origin, social services, and water use. Access to digitized volumes from the HathiTrust.
County and City Data Book Series: Data Sets
ICPSR has data from County and City Data Books covering 1944-1977 1983, and 1988. Data can be downloaded in SAS, SPSS, ASCII, and sometimes other statistical packages. Some files can be imported into Excel.
State of the Cities Data Systems
Data, primarily from 1970 to 2000, on 542 central cities and 10,744 metropolitan suburban places. In addition to demographic, employment, and business data, the SOCDS also contains data on high tech jobs in cities, suburbs, and metropolitan areas, as well as house values and rents, and crime rates. "Fast Look" option allows user to view data tables for one or more selected cities. The SOCDS also includes Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS) data showing housing problems and the availability of affordable housing for states, counties, and places, as well as Urban Finance data (public expenditures, revenues, and employees) for cities and metropolitan areas.
Statistical Abstract of the U.S. 
Statistical Abstract of the U.S. provides a comprehensive summary of statistics on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Divided into broad sections such as Population; Health and Nutrition; Labor Force, Employment, and Earnings; Foreign Commerce and Aid; and many others, the database can be searched or browsed to retrieve results that can then be narrowed by source, geography, time period, subject, and other breakdowns. Rutgers-restricted Access