Data for DH

Some places where you might look for data for historical research.

• Journal of Open Humanities Data: The journal features peer reviewed publications describing humanities research objects or techniques with high potential for reuse.
• Humanities Data: seeks to help collect and disseminate information about publicly available data of particular interest to digital humanities and humanities computing.
• Responsible datasets in context: a handful of datasets that are paired with rich documentation, data essays, and teaching resources.
• Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade: brings together data on enslaved peoples. All data found within Enslaved is published in the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation.
• The RICardo Project: Trade between Nations from c. 1800 to 1938: trade between nations over a period spanning the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the eve of the Second World War.
• Our World in Data: Modern socioeconomic datasets.
• Tidy Tuesday: a weekly social data project where people work on one dataset each week. Explore the previous datasets on GitHub.

Open data repositories

• Virginia Tech Data Repository
• Zenodo
• Harvard Dataverse

R data packages

Many R packages come with some sample data, and there are even some packages that are primarily or entirely designed to distribute and document data.

• Rdatasets: a huge table of datasets in R packages.
• USAboundaries: Contemporary (2024) and historical state, county, and Congressional boundaries from 1629 to 2000.
• historydata: Historical datasets that mostly deal with American history.
• HistData: a collection of small data sets that are interesting and important in the history of statistics and data visualization.