Research Guides: Data Services : BLM Data and Resources

For assistance, please submit a request.
You can also reach us via the chat below, email data.services@nyu.edu, or join Discord server.

If you've met with us before, tell us how we're doing.

Stay in touch by signing up for our Data Services newsletter.

Service Desk and Chat

Bobst Library, 5th floor

Staffed Hours: Fall 2024

Mondays: 12pm - 5pm
Tuesdays: 12pm - 5pm
Wednesdays: 12pm - 5pm
Thursdays: 12pm - 5pm
Fridays: 12pm - 5pm

chat loading...

From the #BLM Collection

"Do you understand yet?!"

One of 86 photos of art in SoHo that was created by artists and activists during the Black Lives Matter movement in June, 2020. The collection of photos, taken and preserved by Bonnie Lawrence, includes web-ready photos, a shapefile, and an ESRI StoryMap.

Black Lives Matter Data and Resources Collection

During the summer of 2020, NYU Data Services embarked on a project to foreground the Black Lives Matter movement in our teaching, consultation, and instructional resources. Our project is motivated by a desire to teach critically and connect others with tools, data, and skills that will enable learners at NYU to explicitly confront racism.

The resources on this guide are a reflection of our ongoing work to develop anti-racist pedagogies. This page is a highly selective overview of NYU Libraries resources and Data Services teaching materials that advocate for anti-racism. Our work has a few goals:

Develop data into formats that are easily used in software by others
Create original research and data that reflects the movements of 2020
Contextualize data with materials and lesson plans for teaching
Augment our existing approaches to teaching to include anti-racist themes

For more information see the NYU Libraries Commitment to Anti-Racism

NYU Curated Datasets and Resources

Photos of Artwork of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Soho, New York City (Shapefile and Images)
This collection of 86 photos represents locations of street art, graffiti, murals, and other scenes of the Black Lives Matter movement that took place in Soho, New York City in early-June, 2020. The images were captured in the days following the murder of George Floyd, who was killed while in police custody in Minneapolis, MN on May 25, 2020. Many images depict shuttered storefronts that have been covered with graffiti, murals, and artwork. These expressions constitute celebration of Black life and outrage for the violence and brutality Black people have experienced at the hands of the police. Please be advised that this collection contains images with profane words and epithets that are borne of race-based violence and hatred. The photos were taken by Bonnie Lawrence. See also the #BLM in SoHo ESRI StoryMap and Shapefile with photos in Spatial Data Repository
Residential Inequality (ESRI StoryMap)
This StoryMap was created by Data Services to visualize residential inequity in New York City and more broadly, in the United States. It is intended to show how census data along with other historical data sets can be used to show how inherently discriminatory housing policy can and continues to contribute to systemic racism in the United States today. Specifically, this StoryMap uses residentially focused data sets in order to narrow the scope of the project and allow for in depth analysis, in which multiple kinds of data are connected with a narrative framework. Any NYU student, faculty and staff can request access to ESRI StoryMaps.
Sentiment Analysis of Black Lives Matter Tweets (R Markdown notebook)
This R Markdown workbook document is a structured approach to quantitatively analyze the reaction to George Floyd’s death and address its political consequences using Twitter data. Anyone can use this workbook to see how we use Twitter data to do sentiment analysis in R statistical programming language. The focus is on text data wrangling, visualization, and interpretation with basic topic modeling at the end.
Racial Covenants in Hennepin County (U of Minnesota Mapping Prejudice Project)
This data was compiled by the Mapping Prejudice Project and shows the location of racial covenants recorded in Hennepin County between 1910 and 1955. Racial covenants were legal clauses embedded in property records that restricted ownership and occupancy of land parcels based on race. These covenants dramatically reshaped the demographic landscape of Hennepin County in the first half of the twentieth century. (Original dataset published in 2020: https://doi.org/10.13020/a88t-yb14)

Washington Post Locations of Unsolved Homicides in the US, 2008-2018
This point shapefile represents locations of more than 52,000 criminal homicides between the years 2008-2018 (approximately) in 50 of the largest American cities. The data includes the location of the killing, whether an arrest was made and, in most cases, basic demographic information about each victim.
Home Owners' Loan Corporation Neighborhood Grades Composite Shapefile, Manhattan, 1937
This polygon shapefile represents neighborhood boundaries and Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) "grades" and notes for major metropolitan areas in Manhattan in 1937. The layer is a polygon rendering of a print map that has been scanned, vectorized, and transcribed by the University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab.

Visualizing Race Identity among Second-Generation Immigrants in New York, 1999-2001
This lesson plan integrates a dataset and sample data visualizations of a study that explore race identity among immigrants in the metro NYC area during the late 1990s and early 2000s. It comes with a pre-cleaned dataset and some example questions and exercises to encourage students to think about how social research engages questions of race identity.

Data for Anti-Racist Research

Hate News Index (ProPublica)
A dataset of media reports, collected by Google News, about hate crimes and bias incidents. Released in 2017.
Open Policing Project (Stanford University)
Data on vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement departments across the country that includes over 200 million records from dozens of state and local police departments.
CSDE Lynching Database (U of Washington)
Presents data collected over the course of nearly 30 years, completed while the key investigators were affiliated with a total of six different American universities. This site includes data that identifies when and where lynchings took place, as well as when and where lynchings were threatened or attempted, but the targeted person was not killed.
Slave Voyages (Emory University)
The Slave Voyages project consists of several datasets that chart the movement of slaves and slave ships over the course of European colonialism. The data is compiled from historical sources and is available with robust documentation and support materials.
George Floyd Street Art
The Urban Art Mapping George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database seeks to document examples of street art from around the world that have emerged in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd as part of an ongoing movement demanding social justice and equality. The database will serve as repository for images and a future resource for scholars and artists by way of metadata that is freely available. In addition, the project will make possible an analysis of the themes and issues that appear in street art, explored in relation to local experiences, responses, and attitudes.

2020 Police Brutality
This repository exists to accumulate and contextualize evidence of police brutality during the 2020 George Floyd protests. The goal in doing this is to assist journalists, politicians, prosecutors, activists and concerned citizens who can use the evidence accumulated here for political campaigns, news reporting, public education and prosecution of criminal police officers.

Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (Equal Justice Initiative)
Lynching in America documents more than 4400 racial terror lynchings in the United States during the period between Reconstruction and World War II.
Data on Crime and Incarceration (Prison Policy Initiative)
Reports, briefings, and data associated with incarceration at the state and national level.

Roper iPoll - questions on Black Lives Matter
The Roper iPoll archive includes over 240 new questions on topics related to Black Americans, policing, and protest in surveys conducted since the June 2020 Black Lives Matter movement.

PolicyMap This link opens in a new window
PolicyMap is a web mapping platform that contains data on demographics, real estate, city crime rates, health, schools, housing affordability, employment, energy, and public investments. Users can create online, interactive maps that can be shared and can upload their own point data to be juxtaposed with the data PolicyMap contains.
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) This link opens in a new window
ICPSR is a data archive that contains data in many areas of social research. Focus areas include the Resource Center for Minority Data (RCMD) and the National Archive for Criminal Justice Data (NACJD).
Users need to login to access. Use the single sign-in with Google and when prompted, use NetID credentials.

Mapping Prejudice - Educators Guide
An educator resource for teaching structural racism through online instruction in the era of COVID-19. The Mapping Prejudice project uses crowdsourced participation to verify and geolocate the contents of race deeds and land covenants that have cause housing and lending discrimination in Minneapolis, MN.
ESRI's Racial Justice and Equity GIS Hub
ESRI has aggregated blogs, data, StoryMaps, and other resources to develop learning with GIS that explores racial justice and equity. For access to ESRI products, fill out this form and indicate that you would like to have access.
National Crime Victimization Survey Learning Guide
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is an important source of information about the level of crime in the United States. This learning guide can be used when students to understand and be critical of Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) violent and property crime rates.

Investigating Community and Social Capital
Investigating Community and Social Capital is a guide with sample data from the General Social Survey and SETUPS that introduces students to quantitative social science research, with a case study on social capital. Some of the concepts illustrated include replication, unit of analysis, level of measurement, analysis over time versus cross-sectional analysis, crosstabulation, creating an index, and correlation.
Changing Representations of Race and Place: A Socio-Historical Meta-Synthesis of Gentrification in Regent Park, Toronto (Requires NYU login)
This case study teaches students to engage the process of finding data and scholarship when studying gentrifying or redeveloping inner city neighborhoods. Race figures prominently not only with regard to demographic changes but also in how places are represented by key stakeholders, such as city leaders, developers, and residents themselves. This case study explores several questions: how is race used to justify certain kinds of neighborhood change and not others? How do residents respond to representations of their neighborhood and even themselves?