5 State Data Libraries Worth Investigating

Start researching today!

Zoshua Colah
Data Science Library
3 min readDec 10, 2018

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Source: https://passportstatus.co/2016/12/08/us-map-50-states-and-capitals-maxresdefault/

Every state in America has numerous organizations and offices that handle large amounts of data for different things, from traffic issues to weather patterns to education details. Luckily for us, almost all the states have made it mandatory to make this information public for the sake of transparency. Listed below are 5 different such sets for you to use in your own data science project!

If you’re interested in similar datasets with a much smaller scope, check out our article on 5 city datasets worth looking into.

Washington

Try looking at the most viewed mountain pass cameras and compare that with the road and weather conditions, or finding a relationship between Puget Sound travel alerts and overall travel times. Be sure to check out the “New and Notable section” for deep and descriptive data visualizations, like an interactive plot of Governor Inslee’s proposed budget plan!

Texas

Comb through a large variety of information, like a report of officer-related shootings in Austin or a list of all business licenses in the whole state. Some data sets even have an option to make a visualization for you, so be sure to search around for a unique topic!

Florida

The Sunshine State’s website is host to a broad range of environmental data, from biology to farming to meteorology. One thing worth looking into is the effect of hurricanes or tropical storms on local environments. Most reports have map visualizations with defined county-borders which would definitely come in handy for any data science project!

New York

Governor Cuomo’s “Open NY” website is a combination of information from more than 30 state agencies and authorities, so the data sets range from education to consumer resources to state budgets. Almost all the data can also be accessed and downloaded straight from GitHub!

Utah

Similar to Texas’s data sets, many of Utah’s data sets have options for you to make your own visualization right there within the website! Some, like the data set for asthma emergency visits from 2002 to 2011, already have flashy charts for you to use already. Check them out and see if you can find your own patterns, like comparing counties or taking a more in-depth inspection of what each group of citizens does.

Thank you for reading. If you liked these resources give our article a clap so that we know we should continue making similar resource lists.

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