I wrote about some of my favourite datasets here. Then I found some more.

• Here’s a dataset of Nixon’s White House tapes. I’m not saying I’ve already marked off a day in calendar to go through this, but no one try to contact me on February 12th.
• You can find a bunch of UK-centric policy datasets here. One that looks particularly good is every single question asked at Prime Minister’s Questions between 1997 and 2008. If you’re unfamiliar with the magic that is PMQs’, I recommend you watch this.
• You can find a tonne of stuff on US legislations (and monitor everything happening in your state) here.
• Hatebase is the largest online repository of multilingual and usage-based hate speech. CrowdFlower also has a dataset specifically focused on Twitter hate speech.

I’m not going to go into the importance of technology in civic participation. It’s important and it’s useful.

I’m assuming anyone who was skeptical before has clicked those links and is now fully on board and can’t wait to work on a bunch of projects that are becoming more and more essential (by the minute, even) in ensuring an open and transparent government.

Here’s a few good places to start:

• Kate Rabinowitz has created a fantastic repository on projects that are working to code against the current administration in the U.S.
• Open Elections Project is trying to make certified election results available to everyone.
• Check out the incredible Women Hack for Non-Profits to see how you can join in.
• Clare Beyer’s Holy Fuck The Election continues to be a source of comedy and incredible resources.

Here’s a list of cheatsheets that have become absolutely indispensable over the past few months:

Regular expressions in Python: I’m only just starting to get what regular expressions do, and this cheat sheet has been incredibly useful along the way.

Pandas cheatsheet: I think I may love Pandas slightly more than I do some people in my life. This cheatsheet covers a lot of the more frequently used commands and functions in the Pandas library.

SQL cheatsheet: I don’t use SQL too often so I tend to forget commands pretty quickly. …

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to hoard as many cool datasets as humanly possible (if knowledge is power, filling my hard drive with as many CSV files as possible is going to make me supreme leader of something.)

Here’s a shortlist of my favourites:

(Quick caveat, a lot of these are from one of my absolute favourite newsletters: Jeremy Singer-Vine’s Data is Plural.)

• Geocoded tweets from October 2013 and November 2014. Quartz posted an amazing interactive tool that lets you map word usage.
• My alma mater has shared its sustainability data and you get to see which…

Let me start this off with the obvious: data is one of the most important things you can have.

It’s pretty much essential to making well-informed decisions, it helps give you a better picture of what outcomes your decisions could lead you to, and it’s pretty great to have facts to back you up in an argument you really want to win.

I recently learnt to use (and love) the .describe() method in pandas to get a snapshot of datasets I’m analysing instead of going cross-eyed looking at every row in a CSV file. But while it’s definitely saved me…