Note that data and code associated with specific papers and projects are listed with each publication.
Practical Resources
LaTex Resources – A selection of resources for writing in LaTex.
Visualization Resources – A selection of resources for data visualization, especially in R.
Plain Text Social Science – A great pamphlet/website created by Kieran Healy on getting set up with some of the tools of contemporary computational social science. Note that despite a nominal focus on “quantitative” work, a good chunk of Kieran’s advice applies equally to qualitative researchers, especially those who regularly need to visualize
Environmentally-Focused Data and Resources
Regulatory Rollback Tracker at Harvard Law School – Dedicated to tacking environmental regulatory rollbacks under the Trump Administration. Detailed and relatively up-to-date information on current efforts to weaken environmental law.
Brookings Deregulatory Tracker – Like the Regulatory Rollback Tracker at Harvard Law, except Brookings-led effort has a wider scope: it aims to catalog all “deregulatory” efforts under the Trump Administration, across policy domains. The effort is affiliated with the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets.
Environmental Data & Governance Initiative – Formed in 2016 out of concerns about the degradation and erasure of environmental data produced and made public by the U.S. Government. EDGI focuses on four core areas: “1) archiving vulnerable environmental data, 2) monitoring changes to information about the environment, energy, and climate on federal websites, 3) interviewing federal employees about threats and changes to environmental health agencies, and 4) imagining, conceptualizing, and moving toward Environmental Data Justice.”
Climate Change Litigation – A great database on litigation related to climate change, both in the United States and abroad, hosted by The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia.
NLCD – Sociologists do not think much about land and nature, but of course social process
RIBITS – The Regulatory In-Lieu Fee and Bank Information Tracking System, which tracks mitigation (ecological offsetting) in the United States. Hosted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Data and Resources Relevant for Research on Germany and Europe
International and Comparative Data and Resources
Comparative Agendas Project – A large, multi-national research effort focused on policy and politics in (at present) 23 nations plus the EU and two individual U.S. states (Florida and Pennsylvania). Aims for consistent and comparable measurement and dissemination of data related to 20 topics and 200+ subtopics.
Varieties of Democracy Project – A large, multi-national project focused on measuring the qualitative features of democracy around the world. Freely available data include 202 countries, 450+ “V-Dem indicators,” 81 indices, and 5 high-level indices for years ranging from 1789-present.
Global Regulation – A database of laws around the world. Subscription based. Provides superficial (and probably not very meaningful) “analytics” of law in a comparative context, but is nonetheless useful for identifying important laws in different nation-states.
U.S.-Focused Data and Resources
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research – An extremely large and comprehensive database of U.S. public opinion data. A little history: the Roper Center was founded in 1947 by Elmo Burns Roper Jr., an early pioneer in public opinion polling in the U.S., and claims to be “the first social science data archive.” The Roper Center was originally based at Williams College, moved to the University of Connecticut in 1977, and has been housed at Cornell since 2015. Requires an individual or institutional subscription.
Just Interesting Stuff
Racial dot map – A simple and compelling way to visualize (a) population density and (b) residential segregation by race in the United States. The map was created by Dustin Cable and is hosted by the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia.
Maps of “purple America” – A simple and neat effort to point out that political ideology and partisan affiliation—at least as manifest in presidential election votes—is more geographically heterogenous than common narratives suggest—and more about urban and rural divides than “red and blue states.”