UN large data sets available
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
Finding reliable large datasets is not always as easy as it seems. The reason is that there is so much potential data and when you are looking for something specific or trying to find a relationship between two or more things, you often have to work with separate and often inconsistent datasets. I could not even find reliable information recently on data depicting battle and casualty data from our Civil War. Though I’m sure there is data available online, I had a difficult time finding any from a reliable source and ended up going to the public library to find and manually enter the data I was searching for.
Though the United Nations doubtfully collects data from the American Civil War, they do have information on more recent civil wars around the globe along with tons of other significant and useful information. The UN recently created a Website called UNdata where they make available a wide range of datasets, from global poverty to WHO statistics. Some good information I’m sure to use in the coming weeks on a personal project.
This is a great book I came across a few weeks back that I would recommend to anyone remotely interested in data visualization. Partly because it’s a great resource and partly because it doesn’t cost you anything.