Data Sources

First, we're going to take a look at some different sources of data. Follow each of the links below, explore the data source, and try to think about which sources would be suitable in which circumstances.

Data.gov

Data.gov (http://data.gov.uk/) is a data portal for data published by government departments and agencies, public bodies and local authorities. It contains a lot of information on government spending

Office for National Statistics

The ONS (https://www.ons.gov.uk/) is the UK's largest independent producer of official statistics and the recognised national statistical institute of the UK.

European Data Portal

The European Data Portal (https://www.europeandataportal.eu/) gathers Public Sector Information of the 28 European Member States, and the four EFTA countries; a bit like a collection of Data.Gov for each EU country.

Twitter Data

Twitter is a great way to get huge amounts of trending social data. If you have a Twitter account, you can request an archive of all tweets you've sent or retweeted (https://twitter.com/settings/account).

Some websites also maintain an archive of tweets that are considered important or interesting, such as every tweet by President Trump (http://www.trumptwitterarchive.com/archive). The university also maintains an archive of some useful feeds (http://tweets.soton.ac.uk/) although access to this is usually restricted.

If you're more familiar with programming, you can use the Twitter API (https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs) to, for example, search for a particular word or phrase. Don't worry about trying this right now, as you have to register your app with Twitter; try it later if you want to!

Data.Soton

Data.Soton (http://data.soton.ac.uk/) is the university's open data service; this contains all of the open data about the university, as well as a selection of tools developed using it, including (https://maps.soton.ac.uk/)

Data Journalism

Many modern news sites publish (or link to) the datasets that they use to write their articles. Some examples are 538 (https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data) and Buzzfeed (https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/everything) - their datasets contain everything from data on fatal police shootings in the US, to surveys of peoples' reactions to the latest Star Wars films.

Exercise:

Either from the sources mentioned above, or from another source you're already familiar with, find a dataset describing:

• The UK unemployment rates for the past five years

• The German unemployment rates for the past five years

• House prices, by location

• How many rooms in the University of Southampton have a capacity of over 100 students

• Financial contributions to US political parties during the 2016 election

• Demographic information about the heros portrayed in Marvel and DC comics

In your groups, discuss:

• Did you manage to find all the data you were looking for? How easy was it to find?

• Which data source did you use to find each dataset?

• Which data source did you find most useful overall?

• What other useful data sources do you know of?