LibGuides: Digital Humanities: Finding Data

What is Data?

Humanities researchers and students use data all the time in their work, but until relatively recently, many would not have classified the material they worked with as data. While data can absolutely be raw files of numbers and spreadsheets, data is inherent to the work of humanities:

Primary sources, survey results, methodologies, photographs, recordings, and more can all be considered types of data that can be worked with digital tools. Knowledge of the tools, helps you to see how to apply them to your data, but often you need data first to understand how to use the tools. A conundrum! If you're looking for starter data to begin your first project, we recommend looking at some of the resources below:

Data Sources

Government resources are a rich source of data to be mined, but they are not always easy to navigate either. As you navigate, consider all the unique levels of government data that might be useful for your specific type of data: Federal, State, County/Parish, or City.

Data.gov
Data.gov increases the ability of the public to easily find, download, and use datasets that are generated and held by the Federal Government. Data.gov provides descriptions of the Federal datasets (metadata), information about how to access the datasets, and tools that leverage government datasets.
HealthData.gov
World Bank Microdata Library
"Facilitates access to data collected through sample surveys of households, business establishments or other facilities. These 'microdata' sets may also originate from population, housing or agricultural censuses or through an administrative data collection processes. "
Bureau of Economic Analysis
Interactive tables of data on U.S., State, and local personal income; U.S. and State GDP; GDP by Industry; Corporate Profits; International Economic Accounts (Balance of Payments, Trade in Goods & Services).
FRED
Federal Reserve Economic Data

The library subscribes to a number of databases which allow for us to download and pull reports on data. Each of these downloading methods will be unique per database. Please reach out to a librarian if you have difficulty figuring out how to grab data.

ICPSR This link opens in a new window
The world's largest archive of digital social science data. Contains over 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences, including specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. (Note: You must create a personal account to access the datasets. ICPSR IS ONLY AVAILABLE TO THE GONZAGA COMMUNITY.)
JSTOR This link opens in a new window
Jstor has a host of hidden projects under http://labs.jstor.org/projects/ as well as letting you build your own datasets with Constellate. Find this under Tools.
Simmons Catalyst This link opens in a new window
Find consumer data. Warning! 10 seat user limit.
Social Explorer
Social Explorer offers access to a suite of online tools and data that allow users to visually explore hundreds of thousands of current and historical data indicators across demography, economy, health, religion, crime and more. Users can customize and visualize maps and data points, create reports and downloads for offline processing, and research concepts in the fields sociology, urban studies, public health, economics, and history.
*If you encounter access issues please try clearing your browser cache.
Statistical Abstract of the U.S. (ProQuest) This link opens in a new window
The Statistical Abstract of the United States is an excellent source for any statistics primarily related to the United States, published by GPO since 1878. Provides data from government sources related to population, health, education, income, labor, science, transportation, commerce and more.

Qualitative data analysis can be done a number of ways. Finding large corpus' of text depends on what on your unique subset.

Project Gutenberg