a curated guide to the best tools, resources and technologies for data visualization
Digital publisher Quartz compiles and maintains this exhaustive and high-quality list of authoritative sources for data on various subjects.
An open-source global database of address data. Parse & import into a database, put on a map, or use for geocoding.
Although still in its infancy, Spreadshare is a novel concept. It essentially acts as a directory to collaborative Google sheets.
The portal for statistics-immediate access to over one million statistics and facts
A community-powered directory of open datasets on everything from government, health, and science to popular games and dating trends.
Automatically pull results from a Twitter Search into a Google Spreadsheet
GovTrack.us tracks the United States Congress and helps Americans understand what is going on in their national legislature.
U.S. Government’s official data portal, providing a wealth of datasets on the nation’s demography, businesses and trade.
Aggregates data from a variety of global public data sources for fast analysis, comparison and exploration.
A full directory of open-data portals globally.
From the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, Net Data Directory collects and shares information on different sources of data about the Internet.
Data Sources
Information about corporations and their subsidiaries.
CrowdVoice is an open source tool that tracks and contextualizes information on social justice movements worldwide.
Dat syncs datasets across the Web and is optimized for speed, simplicity and ensuring data is securely stored.
Datastringer will help you subscribe to data sources, and will notify you when patterns arise or thresholds are broken.
A searchable database of static D3-rendered visualizations from Quartz, along with a web interface for editing visualizations and adding your own data.
The most comprehensive resource for federal campaign contributions, lobbying data and analysis available anywhere.
An almost infinite wealth of public health datasets available for download.
FindTheData is a reference site that uses Graphiq’s semantic technology to deliver deep insights via data-driven articles, visualizations and research tools.
The largest repository of geospatial and other civic datasets in the world, the OpenData platform has all kinds of handy data sources.
OpenSecrets, which is the most comprehensive resource for federal campaign contributions, lobbying data and analysis available anywhere, has more than 180,000 datasets available either as CSVs or via RESTful API.
Hall of Justice contains nearly 10,000 criminal justice datasets and research documents from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories and the federal government.
Data on the U.S. workforce, including unemployment filings, occupational-specific data and trend data.
The Federal Election Commission’s Campaign Finance Disclosure Portal provides a single point of entry to campaign finance data. You’ll find easy-to-navigate maps and charts that display the campaign finance data you’re most interested in. You’ll also find many search tools that will help you through our data sources. You can download many of these data sets to perform your own analyses.
The UCR Program collects statistics on violent crime (murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) and property crime (burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft).
From the National Institue for Money in State Politics, Follow the Money is the nation’s only free, nonpartisan, verifiable archive of contributions to political campaigns in all 50 states.
A guided-tool that allows anyone to easily and speedily submit FOIA requests for data from governments without going through the often lengthy and cumbersome process many government agencies require.
Non-profit investigative news outlet ProPublica offers up hyperlocal data on an array of important issues.
An extensive directory of high-quality datasets.
MapLight researches and compiles data about the sources of campaign contributions in U.S. presidential, congressional, state, and local ballot and candidate elections.
re3data.org is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions.
A collection of public datasets all in one place free to fork on GitHub.
Google Correllate allows you to use its correlation algorithm to compare search terms, or compare two datasets of your own to test for correllation.
Google’s rich and powerful “Trends” tool allows you to query and retrieve search term popularity of any topic over time, make comparisons between search terms, visualize the relationships and export the data as CSV.
IMDbPY is a Python package useful to retrieve and manage the data of the IMDb movie database about movies, people, characters and companies.
Global data on population, demographics, trade and more.
Social Explorer provides quick and easy access to current and historical census data and demographic information. The easy-to-use web interface lets users create maps and reports to illustrate, analyze, and understand demography and social change.
A vast repository of U.S. datasets on almost every topic conceivable, along with the ability to render on-the-fly visuallizations
Aggregates data from a variety of global public data sources for fast analysis, comparison and exploration.
Describing itself as “a social network for data people,” Data.World acts as a real-time stream for sharing datasets–with searchability, exploratory data analysis, SQL query support and visualization tools all on-the-fly.
In collaboration with the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive, GDELT’s Television Explorer allows you to keyword search the closed captioning streams of the Archive’s 6 years of American television news and explore macro-level trends in how America’s television news is shaping the conversation around key societal issues.
A collection of specialist data gathering, handling and manipulating tools and utilities from the Digital Methods Initiative, reworking methods for Internet research since 2007.
The Net Data Directory collects and shares information on different sources of data about the Internet.
Free and open access to global development data
A rich trove of public datasets available for querying via API or downloading as .CSV files.
Enigma’s Public Data Explorer contains massive troves of scraped data on almost any topic of public import. Allows for dynamic filtering, querying and search throughout every record and row of every dataset.
Continuously updated stream of newly released government and private sector datasets available for download.