Datasets for Class Exercises

This is a list of data sets that we will provide for various class assignments.

With each, we try to provide at least some background.

ATUS: American Time Usage Survey

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The American Time Usage Survey is a big data collection effort from the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS. They provide the data files in a very detailed form: data files page One thing that makes this data interesting is that it is done with a great deal of statistical care to document each thing very carefully so that it can be used correctly. Another interesting thing… it’s a massive data set that is a familiar enough topic. Read more…

Data Sets from old Design Challenges

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Here are some pointers to the old Design Challenges that provide data sets. Fall 2021 - Design Challenge 1 Data Sets Spotify College Scorecard (heavily processed) Census Data by County Time Usage Survey Fall 2020 - DC1 Data Sets Census Data Airline On-Time Performance Time Usage (how people spend their time) IMDB movie data Fall 2019 - DC1 Data Sets Airline ontime performance Census Data by Country Beijing Air Quality Fall 2018 - DC1 Approved Data Sets - this year we had a diverse and long list with lots of options. Read more…

Census Data Set

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The “Census Data by County” data set aggregates many different quantities of interest over the counties of the US. I (census_counties.csv 4.6mb) The USDA provides this data as 4 separate sheets (on This page). Any one of them could tell an interesting story but together, they provide a very rich and complex data set full of stories. We have (well, Young Wu, the 765 TA in 2020 has) joined the 4 spreadsheets together (joining by the “FIPS Code” column) creating a single file. Read more…

AidData data set

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The “AidData” data set was suggestion by Prof. Enrico Bertini as one that is good for use in Visualization class assignments. We will use it for a number of assignments in class. The AidData data set: (aiddata.xlsx 4.8mb) The “Reduced” AidData data set: (aiddata_reduced.csv 0.5mb) The data set that we will use is a version provided by Prof. Bertini. I’ll refer to this as the “AidData” data set. As this version is still quite large, have provided a further reduced data set. Read more…