Social Justice Data?

May 21, 2023 5:25 PM

I’d like to practice my data visualization and data manipulation skills, but I especially want to experiment with data visualization. But I need data! What are your favorite sources of facts that point out inequities?

Data sets and facts accepted. I’m looking for nonfiction blogs? Maybe? Or tweets or databases. Things like percentage of homeowners by race or by education. Or anything else you think might be relevant.

posted by azalea_chant to Society & Culture (10 answers total)

The U.S. Department of Education Civil Rights Data Collection
posted by jgirl at 5:41 PM on May 21, 2023

There's tons of public data you can use - the Census is a treasure trove. Beyond the decennial census, there's 1-year and 5-year ACS data for more up-to-date estimates, PUMS for amazing detail (though the fiddliness of working with survey data that needs to be weighted), and so much more.

For financial data, the Fed (look up "Fred data" for the main database) publishes tons. The Fed's Household Debt and Credit Report might be interesting. FDIC also publishes economicinclusion.gov that shows who participates in the mainstream financial system and who doesn't (and why).

Homeownership data itself is in the census. Home lending data is made public via the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, which includes anonymized data on which loan applications are approved or denied (includes demographic info). That's available through the FFIEC and CFPB.
posted by snaw at 5:49 PM on May 21, 2023

This article from Pro Publica shows geographical visualizations of projected impacts of climate change in the US. It draws mostly from this 2020 article in PNAS about the 'human climate niche' and how it is changing. Here is the supplementary material for that article, showing the data sources and visualization methods.
These will give you lots of things to practice visualizing as well as code to learn from.
If you compare this stuff to demographic maps related to race, socio-economic status etc, you'll have a nice study in how climate change impacts intersect with social justice and disproportionately affect marginalized and disenfranchised groups. See also this recent literature review for the state of this research and more data sources in this vein.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:06 PM on May 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

The city I live in, Portland, OR, has a large collection of its data of this type.
posted by bendy at 7:23 PM on May 21, 2023

I bet you could have a lot of delicious fun with Our World in Data. Under "Browse by topics" you can select a topic and a chart of interest and then with each chart there should be a "download" link that will give you a CSV file. An example topic I picked kind of out of a hat -- financing education.
posted by eirias at 7:34 PM on May 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Opportunity Insights has data around economic mobility.

The Prison Policy Initiative has lots of data on the criminal legal system (where there are a lot of issues with data collection and access; Measure for Justice has been working state-by-state to make more of this data public). PPI also has a lot of interesting reports and visualizations they've created, and useful articles and toolkits for how to think about and use this data, all accessible from the page I linked. And here's another example of data visualization around incarceration and geography.

Pro Publica has a collection of datasets that they've used in their reporting here, most of them free.

The City of New York has a lot of publicly available data; other municipalities have similar data sets.

I'd also recommend exploring Data for Black Lives.

And memail me if you want more resources or want to discuss!
posted by earth by april at 8:01 PM on May 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

* Evictions -- https://data-downloads.evictionlab.org/#data-for-analysis/
* Social mobility by neighborhood -- https://opportunityinsights.org/team/raj-chetty/
posted by NotLost at 9:31 PM on May 21, 2023

The UK's government's gender pay gap survey data is downloadable here
posted by crocomancer at 1:46 AM on May 22, 2023

There is loads of UK census and deprivation data on the ONS site. And education and higher education data from the DfE. Data on looked after children here, and children in need and child protection. Ofsted data (school and local authority inspection) here. I find health data can be a bit difficult to navigate unless you know what you are looking for, but if you want to poke around it is here. There is some adult social care data here and here. Data on offending, youth justice, convictions etc here.

You might also like the Guardian's data resources.
posted by paduasoy at 2:21 AM on May 22, 2023

If you're interested in health inequalities then the Global Burden of Disease Study is a great resource.
posted by Limivorous at 11:51 AM on May 22, 2023